My Stars For An Empire
by DictionaryWrites
Summary: Loki's attempt to murder Laufey has failed; Odin has awoken from the Allsleep; Thor despises his brother not-in-blood. Loki, with all this facing him, decides it is time to leave Asgard once and for all. Returning to Midgard, a realm he knew as he was yet a young man, he works to build something entirely new for himself. This is a pretty huge AU, with varied influences.
1. The Inevitable Fall

Standing at the very edge of the Bifrost, Loki takes one more step backwards – the last step. He feels his heel tilt back over the rainbow bridge's icy edge, feels the air stretch out behind him. The Bifrost stretches out through the liminal space between worlds, and the air is too thin here for Loki to Skywalk upon it, as he has walked between so many worlds in his time. Wind whistles about his head, flicking his hair into his face and around his ears, but Loki knows the wind is unnatural, brought about by Thor's stormy tempers alone – with all that power rushing back into him, all at once, he might take a few days to recall his self-control.

"Loki!" Thor says, his voice low and hoarse from shouting. He had shouted so much when Loki had slipped his restraints and fled down the corridor.

 _"_ _Loki! Loki, you cannot flee this punishment, not this time!" Oh, how Loki's feet pound upon the marble floors of the palace, paintings, murals, golden walls speed by on his left and on his right: oh, how Loki's heart pounds. "Where are you going to go!?" Thor's voice is grizzled and angry._

 _Loki lacks an answer. He runs and he runs, with palace guards and Thor himself giving chase, until his feet are pounding upon the crystalline surface of the Bifrost, and not upon Asgard's ground._

"Loki," Thor whispers. He comes closer, but he stops with little more than thirty feet between them, apparently scared to come any closer in case he pressures Loki into falling. Thor's rounded cheeks are red with exertion, and there are circles beneath his eyes – had he slept much upon Midgard, Loki wonders? In the arms of his mundane woman, in his mundane bed, in his mundane world? "Loki, this is no time for your foolish temper tantrums – you caused me to _fall_ , and then you—"

"I caused you…?" Loki repeats. He smiles: the expression is wan. Around him, on every side, he sees stars that he has not known"What a curious reimagining of events."

"You refused to return me to Asgard," Thor continues. "Why, brother? You truly hated me so?"

"Hated you? Never. I hated only the life I was forced to lead." Loki brings his other foot back: now, he teeters on the very edge of nothingness, both heels off the bridge now. He feels the insecurity of his position, the proximity of his final fall. How many times has Loki tried? How many times has he tried to prove his readiness for the throne, tried to abide by his father's rule, tried to be like _Thor_?

Enough times.

"Loki," Thor murmurs. He says Loki's name with so much _passion_ , with so much feeling. Can he really mean it? "You will be forgiven."

"I have never been forgiven," Loki says. "For anything I have _ever_ done. Not truly. Do you know what I want, Thor? What I truly want?"

"Power."

" _Power_ ," Loki repeats, and lets out a laugh. "Have you ever thought about _why_?" How could he have ever believed Asgard might be his? Particularly now with Thor's return, and with the knowledge of his own tainted blood… And who might he pass this legacy onto? Loki thinks of Hel, condemned to the underworld; of Fenrir savage in his chains; of Angrboðr encircling the wide world; of Narfi and Valí, one having devoured the other at the cruel hands of Odin; and worst of all, of Sleipnir, born of his youthful folly in tempting the stallion Svaðilfari. All of Loki's children, all lost to him in one way or another.

"Loki—"

He tips back, and feels himself fall. There is no air here in the thin place between realms, and without it, he falls all the faster. He feels his seiðr coil around his body, changing inside him, frothing in his veins, and it forms a cloud about him – a cloud to hide him from Heimdall's All-Seeing gaze, just until he might be able to secrete himself.

He falls, and he falls, and he replays memories in his mind.

 _Laufey turns as Loki comes up behind him, his blade raised. Laufey's hand is tight around Loki's throat, and he wheezes out a sound, bringing the blade up and through the blue flesh of Laufey's forearm. It is nothing like any of the hundreds of battles Loki has taken to in his years: Laufey is so much faster than any other man or woman Loki has ever faced._

 _He twists the knife, and Laufey hisses his pain._

 _It is the worst parody of a dance, each of their movements matched, step for step, dodge for dodge, and Laufey's own blade comes closer and closer to Loki's throat. Gasping, Loki twists his knife free and just misses plunging it into his father's – his father's! – belly._

 _Laufey chokes, going still, and Loki stares, his lips parted, his eyes wide, at the spearhead that passes from the back of Laufey's neck and comes from his mouth, bloodied and wet with red._

 _Loki stares at Odin as Laufey drops to his knees, the spear Gungir, that Loki had obtained so many centuries ago from the Dwarves of Svartalheim, comes away from Laufey's mouth. "Father," Loki whispers, and he dashes forwards, taking Odin's frail arm and keeping him from tumbling to the ground. Odin is pale and still dazed from the Allsleep, and Loki must take care to prevent him from falling._

 _"_ _Mother!" he calls over his shoulder, and he lifts his father at his shoulders and his knees, taking him to a chaise long in the corner of the room. It sickens him to see his father so pale and drawn, and even touching him makes Loki's skin crawl, particularly with how much weight his father has lost._

Loki's head is spinning. He is gasping for air that is not there, and he closes his eyes as tightly as he can, gritting his white teeth together. Seiðr burns hot in his veins, and he feels himself let out a yell of pain as it grows yet hotter, _hotter_ – he is burning! He is burning, becoming a conflagration, and this is how he shall die!

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"Tony," JARVIS says, and Tony furrows his brow, setting his spanner aside and pulling himself out from under the car. The skateboard rolls easily, but the damned thing is Hell on his back – he'd absolutely shattered his creeper in an unfortunate landing a few weeks back, and he has to wonder if he's ever going to get the hang of the damned suit.

"Yeah, what is it?" Tony asks, pulling himself up with a soft sound of pain. The Bentley can get fucked – he'll fix it tomorrow. Rolling his shoulders and doing his best to ignore their soft clicks, he looks up at the screen JARVIS is showing him. The picture is a little grainy, but he can see something bright flash across the atmosphere and then hit the ground. "Shit, what is that? A comet?"

"It hasn't left a crater, sir. I only show it to you because it narrowly brushed one of our satellites, whatever it is." JARVIS has some information flash over the screen: the thick snow bank the comet had landed in is somewhere in Norway, up in the woods with no nearby cameras or even villages or towns.

"Huh," Tony mutters, putting forwards his hands and adjusting the image on the screen – zooming in is no good, but he can get a good enough look at the thing from when it passed by the satellite. Pretty standard piece of space rock, it looks like – brown-black and absolutely thick with ice. "I guess some agency will go have a look at it?"

"SWORD seems to have deployed not moments ago, sir," JARVIS says mildly. On a secondary screen, up pops a picture of Abigail Brand, the head of the organisation. She's shacking up, Tony hears, with Hank McCoy from the X-Men – and good on that guy, honestly. The two of them are _made_ for each other.

"Lemme know if anything seems up with it," Tony says, shrugging his shoulders. "I'm gonna head up to bed, big guy."

"Good night, sir," JARVIS says, and the lights flicker off behind him as Tony ascends the stairs and exits the lab. He freezes on the bottom stair, and grins.

"JARVIS!" he calls over his shoulder, popping his head through the door. "One more thing."

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"Any biosigns?" a woman's voice calls over the assembled team. The woman is tall, broad-shouldered and strapping, with thick green hair cascading in waves over her shoulders: despite the dark, cold night, she wears thick glasses that shade her eyes. Her team manoeuvres well, covering the ground in careful lines to ensure they have missed no shrapnel or pieces that have come away from the heavy block of ice left in the snow.

Settled upon the thick branch of a spruce, Loki looks down at them as they bustle beneath him, and doublechecks his working. The ice had formed around him in a tight encasement as he had fallen through the atmosphere and onto the planet below, moving at obscene speed: his seiðr had acted of its own accord, heating his blood and ensuring his impact was not so great as to dash open his skull: falling from the Bifrost is very different indeed to travelling through it. He had broken from the ice and then froze it once more, ensuring there was no strangely man-shaped hollow within it and making sure he had left no scrap of fabric, skin or thread of hair: he had reached out, then, doing his best to accustom himself with his surroundings, but found himself unable to recognize them.

Now, planted as he is in a tree, he attempts to think it through. He is on Midgard, certainly, but he is aware that there are a great many nations upon this planet, each with their own particularities, and he has no wish to show himself for the alien he is. Loki believes himself to be somewhere on the Northern part of the planet, and in a place with thick snow… Perhaps he ought follow this crew of cadets, and see what _they_ might know, or to brave the wilderness and merely walk until he finds somewhere suitable—

"Hey! What's that!?" Loki's head whips to the side, following the voice of the young man in a heavy uniform. There is a heavy crunch of snow as something lands. There is a short pause, and then Loki hears a sound like a trumpet call, followed by a loud _pop_ and a burst of something papery landing on the ground.

"Uh, seems like a giftbox, Ma'am," the boy answers. Loki watches the captain stand over the box, which reads in bright, shining letters: **WELCOME TO NORWAY, ABIGAIL BRAND. BYOB (BRING YOUR OWN BEAST)** , and seems to contain a bottle of alcohol. In smaller letters, at the base of the page, it reads, _love from tony stark xoxo_. Frowning deeply, he leans forwards, trying to puzzle this out, but Brand removes her sunglasses and heavily rolls her eyes.

"Stark," she mutters, shaking her head. "Pick up the ice shards and let's roll out! There's nothing fun for us here." She kicks the box away, and within twenty minutes, the whole team have packed into their motor vehicles and driven away.

Loki can be patient. He allows himself an hour before he drops down from his place in the trees and examines the box. It had dropped from above by a parachute, seemingly dropped by some manner of drone – there is a scent of petroleum clinging to the box, very faint, and Loki tastes it upon his tongue. The box contains only its poster card and the bottle, which declares itself to be _The Famous Grouse_.

Shrugging, Loki unscrews the cap and takes a sip. It's whiskey, blended well, and although it isn't very strong in comparison to Asgardian ales, he knows if he drinks the whole thing, well… He might be on his way to a pleasant _buzz_.

Turning, he regards the woods stretching out on his every side, barely lit by the soft light from the stars above. Loki looks up at them, counts them in their shining thousands, and looks at those he would follow to return to Asgard, were he to abandon this folly, were he to Skywalk there. It might take him months, but he could return home, to his own bed—

And to his own punishment.

Swigging from the bottle, Loki begins walking south, and spreads his seiðr about him like a net and searching for _people_. He finds none. After a while, he crosses an empty road: the scent of petroleum lingers here, too, and it seems to him that cars must pass to and fro, but how often he knows not.

Below him, down the hill, there is a wide-reaching lake: it reminds him of a looking glass his mother had once used, and he smiles. He will sit before this shimmering lake and use it for his reflection: he cannot go about in his current form, after all. Midgard might not know what he looks like, but he couldn't possibly risk Thor or some other coming in search of him.

Pausing, he looks up at the sky. There are stars here that he hasn't seen for hundreds of years, so different is this sky to his own on Asgard, or the skies of any number of planets Loki has visited in his thousand years of travelling the universe at large. Why did he always feel the need to return, he wonders, to Asgard? Could he truly have believed he had a chance at the throne once?

Gas particles are colliding in the air far above his head, and they form the most beautiful lights in the sky. He has seen this phenomenon on Asgard, but the way it appears here, upon Midgard, is very different to the way he has seen it before: there are so many more colours, perhaps as a result of their single sun, or some other facet to the Midgardian atmosphere Loki does not yet know.

He can no longer attempt a throne, but perhaps he might attempt happiness. He will settle on Midgard for a time, just until he has a plan to move elsewhere – numerous planets desire change, desire magic, desire a _god_. He will find somewhere he fits.

Loki sets off down the hill, toward the lake, and toward his coming rebirth.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Combing out his hair, Loki kneels in the comforting cool of the snow, and he looks at his reflection in the water. Sitting on an outcrop of the ice, entirely nude and still wet from his swim, Loki looks at his reflection, wondering what to change about his appearance first. His hair, thick and dark and glossy, has always set him apart from his family: in homage, perhaps, he might look more like his mother. Beneath the movement of the pads of his fingers, he watches the black strands soften to a straw-like blond, shortening and becoming a little wavier, curlier. His body thins: he lets himself become a little shorter, but less broad of the shoulder. Then, his face…

Loki drinks from the bottle, and then leans closer to the water. This ritual is one Loki has undergone a thousand times before – more than a mere illusion, this transformation involves the physical _change_ of his body, piece by piece. He shall take on his new form for some time to come, but the process takes its toll, and he will not be able to perform huge feats of magic for some time to come.

He squeezes his chin, bringing in the bone and hardening his jawline. His face is thinner now, and his nose is sharper, pointier. Perhaps lighter eyes? Yes, that works quite wonderfully, a soft periwinkle blue – very fetching, to match his lighter eyebrows. Perhaps even a beard? Ah. Loki frowns at the thick hair on his cheeks and chin and lip, and retracts it some. Yes, that works rather nicely: a much thinner beard, enough to prove he can grow one, but not _messy_.

Looking at his new reflection, Loki smiles. Adjusts his teeth a little. Smiles wider.

"Guri… Hei! Hei du!" Turning his head, Loki raises his chin, looking behind him. The road he had thought deserted now has an automobile placed upon it, and two elderly men are approaching.

"Ja?" Loki feels himself responding, the Allspeak working its magic in his veins. "Kan jeg hjelpe deg?" The two men mutter amongst themselves, and Loki stands from the snow. It takes a few moments for the language to settle itself fully in his head and on his tongue, but he tastes it in its entirety now – this must be the Norwegian language. "You oughtn't step too far out! I'm some way out upon the ice."

"You must be mad!" one of the old men says sharply. "You have on no clothes!" Blinking, Loki looks to the blanket of snow he had comfortably knelt upon: his clothes he had already vanished, ready to replace them with something new once his new body was complete.

"Ah, yes. I do have them – I merely left them in the woods." This excuse seems to do him no good. "I have this!" He holds up his bottle of whiskey.

"You have hypothermia," the younger of the men says, coming closer. He does not have Loki's magic to steady himself on the ice, and slips, falling down on his back. Loki steps gracefully toward him, and, supporting him with strong arms, pulls the man to his feet.

"Hypothermia?" Loki repeats. "What is this?"

"Sven," the younger man says. "Get a blanket from the car." Holding tightly to Loki's arm, this stranger leads Loki away from the lake, and Loki looks at him with undisguised interest. "He does not feel so cold, but I don't know… He must be mad."

"I _can_ hear you," Loki says, with some mild distaste, but he lets the younger man pull him forwards. His gloves are not upon his hands, but are attached to the cuffs of his thick coat with some sort of strap – it's a rather clever idea, and it distracts Loki as the older man – Sven – grabs a blanket and wraps him in it.

"Do you know where you are?" Sven asks. He has white hair that is thinning on the very top of his head, paired with a prominent nose and eyes that are a frothy sea-green. How old is he, Loki wonders, in human years? Seventy? Eighty?

"Norway," Loki says, confidently. Sven releases a scoff of sound, and Loki frowns at him, feeling the thickness of the blanket upon his shoulders.

"Bjørn, get him into the car. Sit close to him, get him warm." Bjørn is younger than the other man, though they have the same prominent nose and softly coloured eyes: Bjørn's hair is still a deep blond, although it is swiftly giving way to silver hairs, and his eyebrows are white already.

"Oh, _please_ do," Loki murmurs, grinning and showing his new teeth. Bjørn seems undeterred by Loki's flirtation, and Loki allows himself to be manhandled into the back of their car. Involuntarily, Loki lets out a soft sound of surprise at the heady warmth that hits him as he is pushed back upon the backseat: they have an internal heater for this automobile, and the heat settles suddenly upon his skin. All his life, Loki has preferred the cold to the summer warmth of Asgard: it is only fitting that he has learned so late the reason. Thinking of Laufey's body, abandoned in the palace of Asgard, he feels his brow furrow.

"What is your name?" Sven asks as he slides into the driver's seat.

"Loki," he says. Sven furrows his light eyebrows, and Loki watches him share an uncertain look with Bjørn in the mirror.

"That isn't a very common name," Sven says. Loki shrugs his shoulders, watching with detached curiosity as Bjørn reaches over him and takes a black strap from beside him, buckling it against the seat. Loki smiles at Bjørn, who responds by placing two fingers to Loki's neck and feeling for his pulse. Loki had softened his flesh, taking away the Asgardian density of skin and muscle and making himself feel more _human_ to those who might touch him. "Your parents eccentric?"

"Oh, yes," Loki says mildly. "Where are we?"

"Norway," Bjørn says. Loki laughs, reaching up and placing his fingers slowly around Bjørn's wrist: he doesn't attempt to pull the other man's hand away, but merely feels the pleasant warmth of his flesh beneath his fingers. Bjørn looks like Sven, but while Sven is some ways into old age, Bjørn is only in the latter stages of his middle age. "We are outside Nerskogen. You were swimming in Granasjøen lake."

"It was very temperate."

"It is minus eight degrees outside," Bjørn says, bluntly. He reminds Loki of Hogun, and Loki feels himself smile despite the situation.

"I don't mind the cold," Loki replies. "Where are you taking me?"

"Into town," Sven says. "We will take you home with us. Treat you… How is his pulse?"

"Normal, Fatter," Bjørn says quietly. "He is a little wet, but he isn't outside normal temperature… He cannot have been out there for too long. Doesn't explain his confusion. What happened to you? Do you remember getting out of bed this morning? Take me through what happened." As he speaks, Bjørn's hand touches Loki's chin very gently, and he shines a light in Loki's eyes: Loki lets out a sound of complaint, leaning away, but Bjørn scowls at him and holds his chin a little harder.

"You have cold hands," Loki says, his fingers still loosely entwined around Bjørn's wrist. It seems to take some concentration to keep his fingers looped: the fatigue of his fall, and all the seiðr he has used, is beginning to weigh heavily upon him. "Are you a healer?"

"I am a doctor, yes," Bjørn says. "I was a paediatrician."

"What is that?"

"A doctor who treats children," Sven supplies from the driver's seat. "Thus his ease in examining you." Loki laughs at the insult, and he lets Bjørn shine his small torch into his eyes. It is to examine, Loki imagines, the dilation and contraction of his pupils, though to what end, Loki knows not. When Loki must deliver medical treatment to an individual, he reaches out with his seiðr, examines them internally before healing what damage he can – the way these Midgardians might diagnose their ills is a curious consideration.

"Do you remember getting out of bed this morning?" Bjørn repeats, and Loki nods his head.

"Yes. But I took a fall… A long fall. I was in the forest."

"In the national park? Were you in Trollheimen?"

"Yes," Loki assents, comfortably feeling out his way. Bjørn frowns, and shares a glance with Sven once more – it is strange, Loki thinks, how entirely at ease he feels within the confines of this automobile, with these two strangers on his either side. Perhaps it is the mild effect of the alcohol, or perhaps it is the fatigue at having fallen and now changed his very physicality, but he feels airy and removed from all things. "I am tired."

"I need you to stay awake, I am afraid," Bjørn says: his white brows knit together as he looks at Loki, and he turns and looks from the window. "Five minutes, and we shall be home."

"Home?" Loki repeats. The word feels entirely foreign to him, and a smile full of whimsy comes to his face. "Alright."

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Thor's forearms rest upon the edge of the balcony, and he looks out over the city of Asgard. The streets are bustling in celebration at the wake of Odin from his Allsleep, and at the return of Thor from Midgard – every citizen is overwhelmed with joy, and dances, sings, marches in the streets.

Thor stands in the balcony of his bedroom, and surveys it all with several degrees of separation. Loki's own balcony is enchanted, in order that no one can see who stands upon it; occasionally, someone will wave up at Thor upon his own, and it would be rude for him to ignore them.

"Thor," Mother murmurs. She stands in the doorway, framed by its four marble edges, and Thor turns back to look at her. Her smile is soft and warm, her eyes focused upon his face. "I am told you met a girl in Midgard."

"Her name was Jane," Thor says. Thinking of Jane Foster, so far away from the Midgardian desert and planted in his city of gold, Thor actually feels himself smile. Jane Foster, so simple and yet so _full_ of genius, so full of goodness, so patient! And now Thor is at home, amongst his own friends again, and Jane is lost to him.

And Loki…

"It must have pained you to leave her," Mother says, taking a step forward. Her hands are warm as they take Thor's own, soft and gentle where they stroke over the back of his hand. "I see real affection in your eyes. You must tell me of her."

"Some other time," Thor says softly. "At this moment, I find myself unable to reminisce."

"Your mind is consumed with thoughts of your brother," Mother murmurs. Her thumb traces a circular pattern upon the back of Thor's hand, and Thor pulls her close, embracing her. His mother's head is a pleasant weight upon his shoulder, her hair soft and straw-like beneath his stroking fingers, and for a long few moments they stand in silence. "Mine too."

"I asked Heimdall where he might be," Thor murmurs against his mother's hair. "He tells me Loki used magic to disguise himself as he fell, and now has somehow eluded Heimdall's gaze, slipped between the cracks… He has no idea what realm Loki might have fallen to."

"Since he was a young boy, Loki has been able to assume skins that are not his own with the greatest skill," Mother says. "This is not the first time he has eluded Heimdall's gaze, although this may be the first time he would admit such a thing."

"He betrayed me. He _tricked_ me, and then wouldn't help me return—"

"It is in his nature," Mother says, and they break apart. He watches her back as she steps away from him, leaning on the balcony, as Thor had not moments before. "He has only ever wanted to be like you, Thor, and like Odin."

"Really?" Thor scoffs. The very _idea_ of Loki trying to be anything like Thor is almost impossible to conceive of: Loki, who for so many years has been so very superior, so condescending, so two-faced and calculating. He loves his brother, but Loki is known for his schemes, his complexities – not for his honour upon the battlefield, or his ability to speak outright.

"Loki cannot be like you, or like Odin. He takes after me." Thor watches his mother's sad, distant smile, and he feels an ache in his chest. It hurts him to see her like this. And yet it hurts… It hurts, strangely, to be without Loki. Even with his betrayal, his trickery, his mischief, even then – it hurts to be without him. He and his brother are each halves of a silver coin. "You know he cannot grow a beard or fight with brute strength. He has never attracted women as you do."

"Loki has been married," Thor points out. "I have not."

"Do you know why Sigyn and Loki parted ways?" Mother asks him. Even as she speaks, she looks out over the city, her brows knitted together in an expression of deepest concentration Thor knows he sometimes has upon his own face, her lips pressed together. "Do you know why she left for the springs, and let their marriage die?"

"Loki is a being of chaos," Thor says quietly. "He has said to me himself he struggled to commit to his wife, and Sigyn, for her part, wanted a more stable lover, did she not? A warrior?" Mother very slowly shakes her head.

"Loki, for the longest time, travelled the universe. I don't know where he went, or what he did while he was gone. I know only that he would be gone for months and months at a time, with little more than an illusion in his place, or some tale told of a trip to Alfheim." Mother clasps her hands together, and says, "You mustn't tell your father of this, Thor. I know not what he might say." She inhales, and then continues, "Some centuries back, you know that Loki took to Sigyn, romanced her. They wedded in springtime."

"I recall," Thor says. He remembers the wedding well: he hadn't known Sigyn well, but she had been positively radiant in her dress of woven leaves, with flowers blooming in her hair and at her feet, and Loki had looked at her as if he had found some great treasure in her. His brother had suddenly seemed so happy, so very fulfilled, and yet…

"They had many children. You know of Fenrir and Angrbodr, and then of Hel. But their youngest sons: Narfi and Valí. You and your friends were far away, on some quest, and Loki… Loki fought with a man who had disparaged my honour, and that of Balder's. He was an elf, with seiðr made to rival Loki's own."

"Yes?"

"Loki embarrassed him. Humiliated him publicly, in the very centre of the city square, although your father counselled against it, and the elf's pride was wounded. He enacted revenge." Thor steps forwards, his expression a mask of concern, because his mother's eyes are dark now, and her cheeks are wet with tears. "He spelled Valí into the form of a wolf, so that he should devour Narfi. Then killed Valí and left a present of his fur on Loki's doorstep. That is why Loki and Sigyn separated, in the end. They were forced to bury their own children before their time – far before their time – because of Loki's foolishness, his pride. He may be your junior, Thor, but his many mistakes precede even yours."

"I believed it to be illness that took Narfi and Valí," Thor says quietly. He remembers returning with Volstagg, Sif, Fandral and Hogun, and returning to the palace with songs of his valour upon his tongue. It had been mid-winter, with snow falling in thick, white flakes – the sort of weather Loki would usually delight in and dance upon, enjoying every day out in the biting frost.

Loki had been locked in his chambers, buried with his own grief. Thor had tried every few weeks to knock upon Loki's door, even as months upon months had passed. Seasons can span _years_ upon Asgard, if they so choose to tarry, and that winter had been the longest in Thor's memory. Loki hadn't appeared in the palace corridors again until midway through spring, and Thor's every attempt to ask after his grief had been aggressively deflected, until he had simply ceased to inquire.

"That was centuries ago," Thor points out, after a long silence spans out between the two of them. "I don't mean to say he ought not _grieve_ , but for it to have been a motivation—"

"I merely mean to say that Loki is accustomed to having happiness and losing it," Mother says. She says it with impossible sadness, the look in her eyes distant and detached. "Some people in life, my son, are destined to be victors, haled as kings, told of as heroes. Others are not. This was a last attempt at the throne, and now… There is something about your brother you've never known."

"Some other tragedy in his past I don't know about?" Thor asks, trying to keep himself from bristling overmuch, and Mother bites her lip.

"The very first of them," she says. "Thor… Loki was not born of Odin and I." Thor stares at her, at her deep eyes, her down-turned lips, her melancholy, and feels his blood chill in his veins.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki's eyes slowly open. He is lying on his back beneath thick, downy blankets, and he is in a room built of wood, with beams spanning the ceiling above him. He is on a small cot folded out from the wall, and he is aware of chairs and a sofa near to him in the room. He hears the soft crackle of a wood fire, and he smells it in the air, along with brewing tea and the crisp scent of new snow. He blinks several times, feels the seiðr in his veins, his tired flesh offering some quiet objection – it is a natural response by his body when he overtaxes himself, an instinct of self-preservation. _Use not your magic, Master! You must let me rest_.

"You are awake," Sven says. He is looking down at Loki, drinking slowly from the tea Loki could scent upon the air, and he is no longer wearing the thick coat he had worn the night previous. Now, Sven wears a shirt of soft flannel, and denim trousers over socked feet.

"You and your son… You are each cleanshaven. Why is that?"

"Bjørn's mother, she always hated beards. And Bjørn himself, well. He looks silly with a beard. Like a statue dusted with cat hairs." Loki laughs. He shifts in the bed, moves to pull himself into a seated position: he is wearing pyjamas, now, and he allows the other man to push the metal mug of tea into his hands. "Drink. You drank a bottle of whiskey last night, in the snow… Don't know what you were thinking."

"I don't remember," Loki lies, smoothly. He takes a sip of his drink, glances around the cabin. His seiðr, weakly pulsing, tells him he is not so far from where they had been in the car, that they are in a cabin isolated from too much else. The cabin has one storey, two bedrooms, and two outhouses – one for storage, another one for butchering. "I had an argument with my father, imbibed too much, and went for a hike on my lonesome. I've never been so drunk in my life… I could have died. Thank you for taking me in."

"It's okay," Sven says. He sits slowly on the side of the bed.

"Where is Bjørn?"

"He is in Trondheim. He works in the hospital there."

"A paediatrician?" Loki asks, recalling the familiar new word from the night previous, tasting it upon his tongue. Sven nods his head, slowly. In the morning light, Loki can see the lines upon his face and the thickness of his eyebrows.

"Not anymore. He was a paediatrician for twenty years, in Tromsø." Loki takes what small pieces of information he has gleaned: a loving son returning to his father after twenty years away… Loki has seen such cases before, and Loki is familiar with the effects of grief.

"What then? He returned after the death of your wife?" Loki asks: he takes on a tender tone, not meaning to accuse or become sharp with his words, and the old man looks at him with a quiet understanding.

"Very stupid, it seems, and yet you seem so perceptive." Sven shakes his head, slowly. He doesn't seem impressed, but merely amused. His lips quirk up into a slow smile, and he rests his forearms upon his knees, seeming to examine Loki with great thought and consideration. "No, my wife passed many years ago. Bjørn's husband was killed in a car crash four months ago: he left his practice and came back home to me here." Loki looks down into the mug of tea, which is a coppery-brown, and has a fruity tang to it. "Who is your father?"

"He is a businessman in Trondheim," Loki says: the lie comes smoothly from his tongue, and slowly he sets the mug aside, pulling himself from the bed. He thinks of Odin Borson, with his white beard and his shining eyepatch, laid out upon a bed with his skin pallid and sweaty, the spear Gungir doused lilac with Laufey's blood. "I cannot thank you enough, I am… Overcome with the weight of my stupidity. I don't know what I can do to repay you."

"You can put on some of Bjørn's clothes and make yourself useful: you can help me butcher the boar we caught last night. Tomorrow morning, Bjørn can drive you back to the city when he goes to work."

"Really?" Loki asks. "Just like that?" These men have trusted him, allowed him into their _home_ , took him naked, sick and drunk (in their view) from the snow, and now here he stands, able to exchange his folly for a favour. It reminds him of Asgard, in a way, this code of honour and hospitality between two strangers – the Asgard he knew best when wearing a false face like this one, and not that of the lesser prince, Loki.

"Just like that," Sven says, and despite his fatigue, despite the ring of burnt magic inside him, despite his uncertainty at this wide, wide world, so different to the Midgard he once knew, Loki feels invigorated.

He feels ready to truly embrace this new life.


	2. Smith & Svensson

**Five years later.**

Tony is antsy. Despite himself, he is antsy, and he fidgets in his seat, tapping his thigh and bouncing his knee in its place. Pepper will occasionally give him a glance, a mix of _"Stop it,"_ and " _Are you okay?",_ but Tony _can't_ stop it and _isn't_ okay, feels the heaviness of anxiety in his chest, weighting down his ribs.

"Do I need to be here?" he asks, for the fourth time: Natasha just gives him a hard stare. Clint turns, not because he hears the question (he's lost his hearing aids somewhere, C, though Tony would bet $100 that he's just "forgotten" them in case there are speeches today), and looks quizzically at Tony for a long few moments. He's a weird guy, Clint – Tony likes him.

" _You okay?_ " Clint signs lazily, with just one hand. Tony shrugs his shoulders. Pressing his lips together, Clint nods his understanding, and nudges Natasha in the side.

The Avengers Initiative, which has now been running for two years, is one of the best things that's ever happened to Tony. He loves the work, loves being able to help people, loves working with Bruce Banner or with Clint in the lab, loves everything about it. He even loves being Iron Man, now that the terror of a secret identity has passed.

And yet here it is, that awful discomfort in his chest, this irrational sensation of complete fear over _nothing at all_ except meeting oh, he doesn't know, a _god_.

Beside him, Steve nudges him in the side. Tony meets his gaze.

"He's not even that tall, Shellhead," Steve mutters. "Calm down." Tony sniggers. Steve offers him a small smile, nothing more than a little quirk of lips, and Tony inhales slowly. Steve Rogers came out of the ice and became an immediate pain in Tony's ass, but these days, it's all fine. Rogers understands the stupidity of Tony's anxiety attacks much better than Tony himself. "I met him already. He's a pretty nice fella."

"Blond, blue eyes, muscle man. You just think _you're_ a nice fella." Steve grins, shows all of his super-soldier pearly whites. He and Sam Wilson are on the trail of some ex-Russian guy, a spy of sorts, who caused a huge problem last year in the middle of the city: apparently Steve'd known him back during the war, before he got put on ice. Steve doesn't show the stress too much these days, even though he must be under a lot. Tony breathes in, slowly one, two, three.

The doors open: all four of them stand. Bruce is out on some project with Rhodey in Maine, and Tony can't help but wish _either_ of them were here, where he could talk to them, let them talk instead of Tony. Bruce and Rhodey are good at talking to people without pissing them the Hell of – Tony, not so much.

Thor Odinson is over six feet tall, with blond hair down to his neck and a short beard, tied up in a messy bun behind his head. He looks a little different from the photos Nick Fury had shown them – his hair is longer, as is his beard, and he seems bigger somehow, more important.

But then, it was eight years ago when Thor was last on Earth: maybe that's a long time on Asgard.

"You are the Avengers?" he asks, and he smiles. He has a nice smile, reminds Tony of a Labrador. Tony's heart is beating too fast in his chest, under the whir of the Arc Reactor, and he can hear his blood pounding in his ears. If he doesn't calm down _right now_ , he's going to have a full-blown panic attack in front of their new team member.

He steps out.

Standing on the fire escape of the SHIELD building, he rests his elbows on the metal railing and starts a breathing exercise. Behind him, he hears the door open and close again, hears the quiet _click_ of a stiletto heel on the metal of the floor: Pepper. She doesn't say a word to him, just lets him work through it.

Twenty-five minutes later, in a private bar, he greets Thor Odinson with a playboy smile and a confident hand shake. It'll just be a little party, mostly of SHIELD consultants and a few of the X-Men, some local heroes. It's not every day you get a whole new member of your team from _outer space_ , is it? Disregarding that weird kid in the Young Avengers.

"Hey there, big guy. Tony Stark."

"You are the Man of Iron," Thor says cheerfully. "I have heard much of your exploits! You are as an Asgardian, making merry as you go. Have you fondness of ale?"

"You know what? I kinda prefer spirits," Tony says. Thor's quizzical expression melts away when he sees Tony's laugh, and he begins to laugh himself. "You're gonna be staying in the Avengers Tower – I built it, and I maintain it, so if you need anything or if you need something done, let me know. I bankroll a lot of the Avengers stuff, even if it's got SHIELD's name on it, you know?"

 _Doesn't play well with others_ , Tony thinks. That was even true, once. The thought makes him smile.

"I must have a horse!" Thor says earnestly.

"A horse? That's… We have cars, wouldn't you prefer that? Or a jet, or— You know what? Send me a list, and I'll let Cap go through stuff with you. For, uh, logistics."

"Cap?"

"Captain America – Steve Rogers."

"Ah, yes!" Thor claps one of his big, meaty hands on Tony's back, and Tony holds in the desperate need to wheeze. That man has some damned muscles on him. "Thank you! I look forward to seeing your might on the battlefield!"

"You too, big guy," Tony says mildly, and he looks fondly after Thor as he goes. Taking a few steps toward the bar, he leans over and orders a whiskey.

"I'll get that," says a smooth voice beside him, with some European accent. The guy is maybe five nine, five ten, with hair a little darker, sandier than Thor's, and blue eyes. There are no real similarities between them, though: this guy has a thin face with soft lines, and he doesn't have the same chiselled jaw; his beard is much shorter, too, trimmed in short little pieces around his mouth and chin. There is something vaguely familiar about his face, but Tony can't quite place it.

"Thanks," Tony says, taking the glass as the woman behind the bar pours him a measure. The guy is drinking a tall glass of some kind of ale with a big head, managing to sip at it without coming away with froth on his moustache – Tony's gonna _have_ to ask how the Hell he manages that. "You buy people drinks often, or am I just a _special_ girl?"

"I confess, I've been hoping to meet you for quite some time," he says, pushing his hair back from his face. Pinned through the shell of his left ear, there is a silver bar, and it matches the tie pin on his silver skinny tie: Tony can't pronounce the name, but he can see the pin has been fashioned after Thor's hammer. The stranger is wearing a soft grey suit, paired with a green shirt, and it actually looks _good_ rather than ridiculous, even with his fancy tie pin and shiny shoes. The suit's tailored nicely to the guy's body, and Tony can see the way that it sticks at his shoulders, his hips, his legs. "I do some consultation work for SHIELD' technology division."

"Do you?" Tony asks immediately, not bothering to hide his intrigue. Very few engineers do _consultation_ work for SHIELD – a lot of them come out of SHIELD's own schools, and pretty much feed into their departments from college 'til untimely death.

"Mmm. My name is Luke Svensson: I'm the founder of Kuldeheim Industries."

"Kuldeheim," Tony repeats. "Sounds like some of the names the Asgardians have for their other realms – you a big fan or something?" Svensson laughs: he has very white teeth, but they're a little crooked in places, and yet Tony finds himself amazed at how chill this guy seems, how _calm_. Some people have their own energies, he guesses – not when it comes to some psychic shit, but just that some people give off the feeling that they're in charge, or that they're ready to take orders; that they're not someone to mess with, or that they're a prankster. This guy comes across as without a care, without seeming like he has weed stuffed into every pocket of his stupid suit.

"No, although I believe that was why Ms Danvers placed me on the guestlist – she certainly saw the humour in it. My parents were each academics before they retired: they believed Loki to be a rather good name for a child, and it actually _says_ that on my birth certificate, if you can believe it. Luke is a little more usual for one to go by, however," Svensson says mildly. "I was raised on the Norse mythology. The pin was a gift from a friend some years back, and I appreciated the irony. _Kuldeheim_ is similar to the names they have for Alfheim, for example, or Vanheim. _Kulde_ means cold."

"Cold, huh?" Tony furrows his brow. _Kuldeheim_. It seems vaguely familiar, and Svensson's face feels like something he's seen before, but he can't quite place it. Svensson's gaze slowly pans away from Tony, fixating on something behind the bar. Tony follows the look: he is looking at the fridge behind the counter. It's a nice fridge, Tony guesses, with a glass front so that the bar staff can see inside, and with a touchpad on the outside to let them change the temperature. This is one of those new fridges that automatically takes its own stock, so that the staff don't have to manually do it at the end of the day. In an icy blue decal on its front, showing a tree in midwinter against a falling or rising sun, and below it declares its manufacturer: **KULDEHEIM INDUSTRIES**.

" _Shit_ ," Tony says. "We have your fridges in Avengers Tower." Tony grins. "They're meant to be the best on the market, right? Fridges, freezers, that kind of stuff." He knows precisely what sort of consultation Svensson does now – there are rows upon rows of hypersensitive blast chillers, freezers, fridges and cryochambers in the scientific labs of SHIELD, and he knows that just two years ago they had a lot of their stuff replaced with something an external engineer had designed. Tony remembers now where he's seen his face: he'd looked with curiosity at one of Fury's files, and been interested in the engineer who lacked security clearance, but who SHIELD was interested in courting. "Steve Rogers saw some of the stuff you did for SHIELD, and was surprised you had stuff on the general market, too – your fridges are hugely energy efficient, and they have some kind of… Fuck, like an air current system so that less heat escapes when the door is open?"

Svensson's nod is confident, but his smile is almost shy. It's a very small quirk of his lips, and he looks down as he smiles: Tony has to wonder how often the guy talks to other engineers, people who actually have an idea of what he makes beyond that it's useful. It's rare to find yourself on a level with somebody else in that way, Tony knows, and he feels lucky to have a few different scientists and engineers he can bounce ideas off, or just work alongside in the lab. He quite likes to work on something in one of the bigger labs in Avengers Tower while Clint Barton sits working on some new kind of arrow – there's no chatter or asking about each other's stuff, but just a simple companionship.

"You're pretty new on the circuit, aren't you? Kuldeheim – the company's like, four years old?"

Svensson seems to hesitate before responding: it looks like he's tasting his words in his mouth, feeling them on his tongue in the same way someone might taste wine. "I started out modifying kitchen appliances, trying to improve them. I would like to branch out, though: I'm actually currently experimenting with computers, tablets… I would adore to launch a smartphone."

"You're ambitious," Tony says, with a little admiration, and maybe a little flirtation. Where is Pepper? Would she hate this guy? Would it be fucked up if the first person Tony tried to get into bed with after their break-up was a dude? An engineer? A fridge expert? "Not everyone can be a playboy, genius, philanthropist…"

"I believe you're projecting, Mr Stark," Svensson says, with a small quirk of his lips. "I don't think I claimed to be any of those things." Tony finally takes a sip of the drink Svensson had bought him, and takes a seat at the bar. Svensson, with his long legs, stays standing, leaning casually against the bar as he drinks from his glass. "I'm a great admirer of your work. The Arc Reactor is a truly impressive piece of electromagnetism – it actually inspired me in my current venture."

"Yeah?" Tony asks, leaning his elbow on the bar and placing his chin upon his hand. "What's that?" Svensson's eyes light up: he takes his hand away from his glass, and gestures with some passion as he speaks.

"Computer processing! Our primary issue with laptops, smartphones and tablets is in the matter of size, you see: there is a limit to how much processing power you can fit into such a small space, as you need the processor to be small enough, and you need fans to keep the engine cool. I've been experimenting with tablets, initially – I'm currently testing a very early prototype, but it's _so much_ more exciting to work with than fridges and freezers. I always found that sort of engineering quite simple, but computer science is much newer to me, and so _fiddly_ in comparison. Oh, I love it." The guy is in his mid-thirties, but when he gets excited, some kind of energy seems to show in his eyes, something much more youthful, like he could be just nineteen.

How long has it been since Tony heard a guy talk so excitedly about something so _completely_ within his sphere? How long has it been since Tony's talked to a civilian with such a damn brain in his head? Talked to someone who was just smart, without being a superhero or a mutant or an… Ex-carnie?

"Tony!" comes a call from the door: Rhodey is waving from across the bar, a big grin on his face, and Tony can see Bruce behind him.

"I gotta go, Mr Svensson."

"Luke is fine," Svensson breaks in. There's something different in his eyes, now, that Tony can see – a spark he hadn't quite spied before, a spark of something warm and friendly.

"Luke. You can call me Tony. Thanks for the drink – we should meet up some time. See if we can't make a playboy out of you." Svensson laughs, the sound long and low and deeper than Tony had expected.

"Of course, Tony," Svensson murmurs. He gives Tony a little wave, takes his drink, and steps away. He sees the guy later that night, engaged in deep conversation with Pietro Maximoff over drinks: Maximoff barely ever sits still, and cannot usually be convinced to maintain a regular conversation for a lengthy time, but he and Svensson had been speaking in Polish, and Tony imagines that improved the mutant's sympathy for Svensson quite a bit.

He'll look Svensson up once the party's over, he thinks. Guy seems pretty damned interesting.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

 **One hour earlier.**

Loki vomits, and the thickness of his own bile makes him cough. His most recent meal – a rather over-seasoned chicken breast, paired with a wonderful gratin and a wine he'd discovered a newfound affection for – spatters messily into the sink. He had sprinted into the bathroom, unable to utilize his magic in such a closed-in space, with so many superheroes, mutants and the like around him. His skin is covered in a sickly-cold layer of sweat, and he feels himself physically _shaking_ with a mix of terror and uncertainty.

No one had _told him_ for whom this party was being held.

Maria Hill had extended the invitation to Loki, and Loki had been rather flattered to accept – he had been told this would be a private gathering for some members of the super community, as well as certain suppliers and business-owners, to greet the new member of the Avengers from his home planet. Loki had, of course, inquired after the hero's identity, but apparently it was intentionally kept a surprise, and now Thor is here, _Thor_ , Loki's own brother—

Loki gags, chokes, and more vomit spatters into the sink. The smell is awful, and he flicks on the tap.

He hears the door open behind him, and he stiffens: he cannot use his magic here, where it can be recognized, where _he_ could be recognized. There is no escape, trapped in his human alias.

"Hey, Svensson. You okay?" Loki looks up at the mirror. His own face is pallid and marred with a thin layer of shining sweat, his lips stained, his eyes puffy and slightly watery; the man in the doorway looks quite healthy. He has silver-white hair, angular bones, a prominent nose… Pietro Maximoff: Quicksilver.

"I wasn't aware you knew my name," Loki coughs out. His entire mouth feels sour and dry with bile, and in a second's flash, Maximoff is across the room, examining Loki with care. A glass of water, conjured seemingly from nowhere – Maximoff easily moves far faster than even Loki's eyes might track – is pressed against his palm.

"Know your name, know your story. Don't know why you're retching up your lunch, though. You sick?" Loki takes a sip from the glass. The water is made bitter by the remnants of his stomach contents clinging to the inside of his lips, his teeth, his tongue, but he gulps it down nonetheless. As a result of the anxious tremors racking his body, the glass of water is held in a white-knuckled grip, and its tide moves from one side of the glass to the other as he fails to hold it steadily.

"I doubt that," Loki mutters. _Is he sick_?

Loki wonders how best to approach this. How does it look to any one of these people at this party, the majority of the attendees acquaintances or strangers with whom Loki wants to grow closer? If he claims illness, he will be forced to take his leave, and that might be suspicious, particularly after the guest of honour has just arrived – but then, why should anyone notice his taking his leave? _Luke Svensson_ had been a curiosity, an extra name upon the party guestlist. He is under no misapprehensions: Maria Hill had invited him because Fury had no doubt amused himself with the idea that Luke Svensson might be over-the-moon to meet his childhood hero…

Or perhaps that is the route he might take.

"Not sick," Loki murmurs, taking a pause to drink heavily from his glass. "It is merely that Thor Odinson… He is a figure of my childish imaginings, one I think of as I remember being a child at the hearthside, or walking with my father and hearing his stories. To see him _in the flesh!_ " Loki brings a little light into his eyes, tries to force his shaking to stop for just a second, tries to show excitement. "I cannot help but think he might find me wanting."

Maximoff studies Loki like he might study an interesting specimen collected in the field. Loki has met the man's father, and it is astonishing to see the similarities in their faces, in their hard looks and deep eyes – and yet in personality, he has grasped in snatches of overheard conversation, so completely at odds! Loki thinks of Hel, with her smooth, white skin, her green eyes, her cupid's bow and her black, black hair. She looked like Loki, once – before he took this new face.

His stomach gives a lurch, but this time he holds it in check.

"This is a unique situation," Maximoff says quietly. Loki knows him to be Polish in his birth, and yet his accent doesn't betray his origins – he sounds generically American, with an accent not so different to that of many of those Loki speaks to here in New York. Why is that, Loki wonders? _Why_? "Are you scared to meet him?"

"Yes," Loki says. The honesty falls from his tongue like water, flowing in the same manner as his lies – but lies taste better. "I don't know what to do." Maximoff is past seventy, but neither he nor his twin look their ages, assisted by their respective mutations – and Magneto himself! Well. The man is doing well for his age, Loki will happily declare, for a _human_.

"You are young," Maximoff says quietly. How little he knows. "It is so easy for us to put those we admire on pedestals: we must remind ourselves that they too are people. As my nephew would phrase it: we all take a piss, don't we?" Maximoff's thin lips quirk into a small smile, and Loki gives a slow nod. He oughtn't flee, no – better to meet Thor, better to meet him in this human skin, put on all the anxieties, perhaps even spill a drink. To seem embarrassed and uncertain – that will appeal to Thor's ego and keep him from latching onto Loki in turns. Thor likes to be made a fuss of, and someone seeming _scared_ in his presence will swiftly be left alone.

"Thank you," Loki murmurs. Maximoff inclines his head. "How did you know me?"

"I build most of my own appliances," Maximoff says. "Bought one of your fridges."

"Really?" Loki laughs, despite himself. What a strange world Midgard is – the consumerism doesn't shock him, but that his products can reach so far and so wide, so easily… That delights him. "I will take a moment to collect myself – and to rinse out my mouth. Then, I shall introduce myself with honour."

"Thor is a good man," Maximoff says with confidence. He says it with _such_ confidence that Loki is sure they must have met some time before this, that he must have some experience of Thor to believe him to be so. "But he's just a man. No more different to any of the mutants you work with, or the other hero-types. Do you follow me?"

"Like a hound."

"Good." Maximoff smiles. It is a tiny shift of his lips, which are normally kept in a thin, tight line.

"Your accent," Loki says, in the half-second where Maximoff begins to make his turn away. "You sound like an American." It strikes him that anyone else, anyone not in the same position as himself and Maximoff – coming from far-off lands and standing here on American soil, surrounded by a melting pot of strange ideas – might see the change in subject completely bizarre. But Maximoff knows. Although he could not possibly be aware of the gravity of the situation, could not possibly conceive of how much of a foreigner Loki _truly_ is, there is a parallel between them Loki cannot deny.

"People look at my hair, they see I'm a mutant," Maximoff says, his hand upon the bathroom door. His tone is carefully pruned of emotion, but Loki can taste the bitterness upon the air. "They needn't think me a foreigner as well." And in the next second, Maximoff disappears.

Loki looks back to himself in the mirror.

He thinks of the way his skin had been, all those years ago, when he had touched the Tesseract – how colour had seeped over his white flesh like dye in milk, how his eyes had darkened to blood red, and how he had so resembled those monsters he had been raised to despise. But that had been his old face – the face of Loki Laufeyson. Much has changed since then, for now he wears the face of another man, far removed from his Norse roots.

Reaching up, he touches his own cheek, feels the dusting of hair there. Five years on Midgard is a long time, for those that know what to do with it.

Loki well remembers his fall.

How long ago has it been since he left Norway behind him, coming here, to America, to New York? Three years?

The two years he had spent in Norway had been dedicated to carefully crafting a life for himself – using seiðr to subtly affect the memories of those in Trondheim, creating a false history for himself, he had ensured everyone knew Luke Svensson, the son of Arnljot and Jonfrid Svensson, who had been leading academics in the field of Norse mythology. Strange pair – they had kept to themselves in an isolated area, lived in their cabin alone to work on their respective papers, but were well-liked on the few occasions they decided to venture out into Trondheim proper.

And in New York…

When Loki was a child, he had dedicated his every waking hour to practising his magic. Spending hours locked into his quarters, he had experimented with one spell and then the next, building up his tolerance for the magic that would flow through his veins, and then as he had begun to travel the universe, Skywalking from one realm to the next, he had never wavered in his devotion. But in recent years, in the past few centuries…

Only upon settling in Midgard had Loki realized how comfortable his magic had become for him. How easy, how _normal_ , settling on his body like a second skin, filling his every moment – Loki Laufeyson had a thousand spells for every moment, could curl magic about his fingers and spread seiðr about the room. But Luke Svensson? Well, if _he_ used magic for everything, certainly eyebrows would be raised. Even if he were to attempt to secrete himself amongst the mutants or the Inhumans, too much scrutiny would be laid upon his shoulders – better to disguise himself amongst the entirely human of the world.

But without magic? Without that careful dedication, concentration – a hundred tasks to consider in every second? He had been _bored_.

Technology – technology as the Midgardians view it, separate from the natural flow of seiðr in the world – had been a new source of fascination. A new source of delight.

There are parallels between the two, between magic and a piece of engineering, but the latter was different enough to be new. To be exciting! To be… magical.

Loki stares at his reflection, at his sea-green eyes and sandy hair. _You are human_ , he whispers to himself. _You are an engineer, a technological wizard, and you are human. Thor is a fantasy to you, a hero of your childhood, a living wonder. He will suspect nothing of you but your adoration, and that will make him uncomfortable. He will leave you be within minutes._

Loki exhales. His hands are shaking. His skin still has a sheen.

But he is ready.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki extends his hand, a bright smile on his features, his eyes a little glassy. Thor looks so different. He seems so much taller than he did when Loki saw him last, so much broader, and yet… He is older. Thor radiates confidence, but not arrogance, now – there is a temper to it, something like wisdom. For so long, Loki has been aware that despite Thor's greater age, Loki had always had more certainty, more maturity. For the first time, in Loki's _life_ , he stands before Thor and feels like Thor may just be his equal.

And Thor can only see the human before him. Not even a mutant! Not even an Inhuman! But a _human_.

"Thor," Loki breathes, bringing the _spellbound_ into his eyes, his lips, his tongue. "I mean— Ah, Mr… Odinson. Sir. I, uh, I—" Loki's hand is shaking even more, now, and Thor grasps it in his own.

"What is your name?" Thor asks quietly. His smile is soft, encouraging.

"Loki," Loki blurts out. Thor's eyes widen, just as Loki knew they would, and so he amends, "Luke, to most, but Loki on my birth certificate. Luke Svensson – Loki Svensson. My— My parents were… I grew up on the stories of— You're so much taller than I thought." For the longest second, he thinks Thor will turn away, clap Loki cheerfully on the back and declare it a pleasure to have met him, whilst walking swiftly away to hide his own discomfort.

"I am tall," Thor agrees, and he smiles. "You were named for my brother – for Loki. What was your favourite of his tales?" This is a question Loki didn't expect. He feels his breath catch in his throat, wishes for his magic, that he could shroud himself, that he could fight, that he could flee.

"I love the tale of Loki and Skadi," he says. It is one of the tales in the Norse mythos that he did not know himself, and it had made him laugh uproariously when first he had learned of it. He has read many articles on that particular tale, and delighted in it – after Idunn's kidnapping (something Loki was most certainly responsible for), the giantess Skadi had apparently come to Asgard to demand recompense for the death of her father, and one of those demands had been that someone was to make her laugh. The Loki of myth had apparently accomplished the task by tying a rope between his testicles and a goat's beard, so that each of them squealed as the rope was taut between them. Loki has never known of a giantess Skadi – he had known Thiazi to be childless – but he hopes the tale was inspired by some real event, if not himself.

Thor gives a rueful chuckle. "One that brought me joy as well, although not a real event, I fear. We must meet again, Loki, son of Sven."

"Oh," Loki says. "No, no, my name is Luke—"

"My brother was lost to me some time past," Thor murmurs: he places his hand on Loki's shoulder, and Loki wishes for a moment he had made this human form of his taller. "The idea that a man should carry on his name brings me more joy than you could imagine. Use the name your parents gifted you, and carry magic where you go." A warmth appears and spreads through Loki's chest, heating his heart and settling in his lungs, and his smile is entirely genuine.

"Thank you," Loki says. It surprises him how much the words ring true – and for once, he does not wish for the taste of lies on his tongue instead. His delight is real, and true, and Thor… Is different.

Loki is glad he might be happy, and that he might grow, just as Loki has in separation.

Stepping away from Thor, Loki smiles to himself. Relief bubbles through him, and he feels the stiffness and uncertainty leave his body all at once, feels himself relax entirely. When he goes to the bar and purchases himself an ale to drink, he looks at the fridge behind the bar – _KULDEHEIM INDUSTRIES_ , it says. Kuldeheim: Loki's very own empire, and now, with his brother's permission, in his own name.

He looks at the man that comes to the bar, with his thick hair and his grey suit, sunglasses hanging from his pocket – this man is Tony Stark, and his work has provided an excellent frame of reference for Loki to begin his own engineering focus. He had taken apart a great many Stark products, examining their engines and their moving parts, just as he had various other implements upon the market.

But only two or three engineers or architects had really taken him aback with their subtlety, their artistry, their _skill_ – and Stark's work stands out among them.

"I'll get that," he says as Stark makes his drink order. He looks at Stark's smile, at the way the way his sculpted beard shifts with the change in his expression, and he delights in how there is no longer any tension in his body whatsoever. He is calm, he is confident… And he is _entirely_ human.

Or so they think.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"Anything interesting happening out in the wide world today, JARVIS?" Tony asks. He says it absently, almost throwing the question over his shoulder, as he bends over the generator in Avengers Tower. It's nothing crucial – just a little routine check-up of the old girl, making sure everything's in fine, working order. He likes to have a look over the generator every month or so, just to make sure – just to _check_.

Some nights, he wakes and lies in the middle of his bed, stares up at the ceiling under his blanket of sweat and scares himself with the thought of what might happen if the Avengers Tower was attacked and Tony's fail-safes failed, or if the foundations blew, or if the generators broke down.

It's a good time he has JARVIS to talk to, now Pepper lives in Avengers Tower. It's better than letting the silences stretch on.

"An interesting advertisement was printed in the classified section of several of the newspapers today."

"Papers, huh? Pretty old-fashioned," Tony mutters – it doesn't matter. JARVIS can hear him.

" **WANTED**. _Personal assistant wanted. Vim, intelligence & a sense of aesthetic required. Inexperience preferred. No degree necessary._" Tony furrows his brow, glancing over his shoulder at one of JARVIS' screens: he's scanned in the newspaper page, and Tony can see the script from the paper, as well as a neatly printed phone number. "The number matches the head office of Kuldeheim Industries, here in New York, sir."

"Huh," Tony says. He'd mentioned to JARVIS when he'd come home from Thor's welcoming party the night before that he'd met Luke Svensson, and JARVIS had brought up some interesting stuff. Tony read some of his mom's book last night – or maybe his dad's. He doesn't know _shit_ about Norwegian names. It had been interesting stuff: retellings of the Norse myths, most of which Tony had never heard before. "Pepper has two degrees – I always figured people kinda wanted their PAs to have degrees."

"I believe most do, sir. When I placed an advertisement for the position Ms Potts eventually assumed, I stipulated Bachelor level or higher."

"Maybe he's going for something else," Tony says, in the tone of someone brushing it off, but it takes a forefront in his head. _Inexperience preferred_. That just sounds creepy, and yet having met Svensson, he feels like if the guy was some kind of sociopath or monster, the guy wouldn't be this stupid in trying to carry them out.

"Perhaps," JARVIS agrees, in exactly the same tone as Tony. Damn bastard knows him too well.

He hears movement on the stairs down into the basement, footfalls on each step, big ones. Could be one of the X-Men, he guesses – Rasputin has visited a few times recently, or maybe Luke Cage if he's in a pissy mood.

The door opens up. Thor Odinson pops his head through.

"Hey, big guy," Tony says. "You lost?"

"I am wandering," Thor says cheerfully, as if that's an actual response. Tony chuckles, and he picks up a spanner, loosening a maintenance hatch and opening it up. Thor steps up behind him, curiously looking over his shoulder as Tony works. Tony had a look at some of the Asgardian technology – most of it is far beyond what they'd grapple with here on Earth, but they use so little of it, primarily relying on more classical means of education or transport. It really _doesn't_ seem like Tony's kind of place.

"How're you settling in?"

"I spoke to the Spiderman," Thor says. Tony grins.

"Isn't that kid a marvel? He's only twenty-six, you know," Tony says, reaching in and feeling around inside the hatch. No undue heat, which is what he's checking for, so he pulls his hand back and closes it up. Parker runs circles around Luke Cage, and the two of them are almost _always_ bouncing off each other, playing videogames. "You met Deadpool yet? Wade Wilson?"

"Deadpool?" Thor repeats. "No."

"He sticks to that kid's side like a bad penny. Trust me, Thor: you rarely see Spiderman around here if Wade isn't right behind him." Tony pats the generator fondly, then stands and gestures for Thor to follow him back up the stairs. "What made you decide to come here? To Earth?"

"A diplomatic arrangement," Thor says. "Certain artefacts have fallen from my realm to yours, and it is best for us all that they be suitably contained. Midgard lacks the technology to reign in some power."

"Ain't that the truth?" Tony says, not bitterly at all. _Totally_ not. "What, and SHIELD said, sure, you can have the stuff, but only if we get one of you guys out of the deal?" Thor's chuckle is rueful.

"Not exactly," he says. "I have been to Midgard once before in recent times, five years ago. I met a woman here: Jane. She and I are now re-acquainted."

"Uh _huh_!" Tony chuckles to himself at the idea – Thor's a big, handsome guy, and it makes sense to him that Thor would have girls interested in him. Thor even seems the slightest bit _shy_ about revealing the details, not booming as he ordinarily would. "She pretty?"

"She is a genius," Thor says, categorically. "Never have I heard someone speak of the stars as she does, with such knowledge, and such wonder."

"You stick with her," Tony says. He thinks of Pepper, thinks of the way he'd watch her sometimes in the morning, when she was pouring over documents or looking at stuff on the big screens. She'd been at her most beautiful when she was concentrating on something complicated, worrying her bottom lip under her teeth, her blue eyes in deep focus. "You stick with her, big guy."

"Yes," Thor says, with a quiet delight. "I shall."

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki looks up at the screen, examining the screen. The night before, a series of programs had attacked his computer system, and Loki had allowed them access – his own personal files occupy a private network, disconnected from the Internet entirely. The program had carefully combed through his files, searching for _something_ , and he'd been curious about its flourishes and its stylistic elements – they had been most distinctly non-human. _Distinctly_.

The computer tracks it to a little house in Ealing, London. Just a normal house, in a little borough.

Loki frowns.

"Mr Svensson, your eleven o'clock is here."

"Thank you, Reethika, please allow her in." It is raining outside. Rain comes down in fat droplets, pattering against the wide windows of his office. He is not on the highest floor of the building – Loki's own sense of strategy had dictated to him that such a thing would be too obvious a weakness to exploit, were he to ever be attacked – but there is a beautiful view of the city below.

The girl is pretty. Not audaciously so, not made out in the ways that the models of Midgard are, but pretty. Her hair is chestnut brown and wavy, falling about her shoulders, her eyes a darkened blue, her lips plump. Something about her is vaguely familiar, now that Loki sees her in the flesh, but he cannot quite put his finger on it. He glances at the file on his tablet: _Darcy Lewis. 24. Bachelor's degree in political science. Mixed experience._

"I have a reference," she declares. She says it matter-of-factly, with the slightest bit of aggression, as if she's expecting to be disbelieved, and she steps up to his desk, handing out a folded piece of paper to him. Written in a slightly messy but legible script is, indeed, a letter of recommendation.

 _Dearest Loki, Son of Sven  
(Mr Luke Svensson)_

 _Darcy did not ask for a letter of recommendation, but I insisted I give her one when she mentioned you had accepted her interview for the position of your personal assistant. I came to Earth once before, five years ago, and I was assisted by two scientists – Erik Selvig and Jane Foster. Darcy was, at the time, their "intern"._

 _Darcy is prone to bouts of physical violence, and responds immediately to any situation. I consider her to be a most honourable warrior, and a surprising ingenue, and believe she would benefit from a position in your company._

 _She is sarcastic. She is semi-monstrous. But I like her! I think you will too._

 _Yours,  
Thor  
Son of Odin._

Loki smiles.

"What does it say?" Darcy asks. "He told me not to read it." Loki looks up at her, examining her. She wears relatively cheap clothes, he notices. By no means is the girl badly dressed, but she is thin, and her clothes are worn, her shoes scuffed.

"But you did read it," Loki says. "Didn't you?" Darcy Lewis looks him in the eyes, her own widening slightly, her lips parting. There is absolutely no guilt on her features, no guilt at all, but mere surprise, and perhaps the slightest bit of awe.

"How'd you know that?" she asks, and she shows a little of her teeth, showing him a slight smile. Her teeth are rather white.

"You aren't the only natural liar in the world, Ms Lewis." Loki slowly stands from the table. Leaning over, he presses his finger to the intercom, and says, "Reethika?"

"Yes, Mr Svensson?"

"Please call the other three interviewees and inform them the position of my personal assistant has been filled, but that they are welcome to come in for their interviews nonetheless."

"Yes, Mr Svensson," Reethika says brightly. He will be sad to see her go – Reethika had been his personal assistant when he first began Kuldeheim Industries in New York a year and a half previous, but recently she had expressed a desire to return home to her mother in Gujarat. Loki is awarding her a generous severance package, and he had offered to open an office in Ahmedabad, and give her a management position, but she had politely refused. Such an honourable girl.

Loki truly will miss her.

"Is that it? Seriously? You read Thor's letter and suddenly I'm hired? What if I faked it?" Despite her apparent surprise, Darcy Lewis does not lose confidence or come suddenly shy. She still stands before him, looking out of place in his clean, modern office, with her hands in her pockets and a most hideous hat of knitted wool hiding the top of her head from view.

 _I recognize his handwriting_ , Loki thinks of saying, but it would be far too suspicious. "You didn't fake this. Thor and I are acquainted, and a few of the salient details of our meeting have bled through. Have you only recently ceased to work for Ms Foster?"

"Pretty recently," Darcy Lewis says. She seems to be fighting the urge to teeter between her toes and her heels, and it seems to him she is _precisely_ what he wants in an assistant. Any individual who had previously been an assistant would have formed ideas of how to approach the work, and for now…

"I just referred to her as _Ms_ , and not as Doctor," Loki points out. "Many young women – particularly academics – would correct me on that point."

"Isn't it, uh, kind of illegal to try and ask if I'm a feminist during a job interview?"

"The job interview ended some moments before: you are now hired. I should like you to begin work on Monday. Also, no, I don't think so. Were I to ask if you were to become pregnant, or if you were pregnant – something like that might be an offence. Asking as to ideology is rather different."

"You said the others should still come in, for interviews," Darcy Lewis says. She examines Loki as if she's examining something truly alien – around his staff, Loki is a little less anxious than usual as to revealing who he might be. He can be more… _Usual_. Whatever usual is for him, in this form. "Why?"

"I'm curious as to what manner of people they might be. I read their resumés, and their cover letters. The people I called into interview drew my curiosity – even if I may not want them in their capacity as my personal assistant, I may still wish to hire them elsewhere. It's difficult to find a job in New York." Darcy furrows her brow a little, leaning in toward him. Her practised façade of apathy interests him, but it fades a little here, instead replaced by a genuine curiosity.

"What, so you're some kinda philanthropist? Seriously?"

"Not at all," Loki murmurs. "I merely believe in, shall we say, cultivating loyalty. Kuldeheim is my empire, Ms Lewis: I rule it fairly, with all intent to care for those within its sphere as I carefully build and expand. Do you understand?"

"Nah," Darcy says. "You're batshit." She says it admiringly. "And _hot_."

"Do you think so? I've always thought myself rather cold." He ought not stand for flirtation, not really, not from a new employee… And so he shall not. Loki stands, adjusting his tie, and then says, "Let us walk together. I'll give you a tour of your new workplace – as well as your salary, I will offer you a stipend for an appropriate work uniform. Heath insurance comes with the position – dental healthcare is included, I should mention, as well as use of the gym on the corner. There's a Kuldeheim tab."

Darcy grins.

"Okay, _Son of Sven_. Let's go."

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Settling back in her chair, Sarah Jane frowns at Mr Smith's screen.

"Nothing seems untoward," Mr Smith says. Pages and pages of data scroll across the top corner of the screen, and Sarah Jane puts her hand on her chin, frowning up at it. Something about it all seems a little bit _wrong_ , a little bit strange and off, and yet… "There is no sign of alien life, beyond the strength of the technology. My apologies."

"Oh, don't worry about it, Mr Smith. If Kuldeheim Industries seems _normal_ , perhaps you're right – it just feels like that company's growing very fast. Too fast."

"I share your suspicions, but I cannot find anything."

"And in his history? In Luke Svensson's?"

"Nothing, Ma'am. He was born in Norway, and went to America two years ago. His parents were academics." More information flashes across Mr Smith's primary screen, showing Svensson's date of birth his parents' books, and even childhood photographs pulled from his social media.

"Mum?" Sarah Jane turns. She sees Luke in the doorway, looking slightly ruffled from sleep. He's really enjoying school, it seems to her – but it absolutely exhausts him, thank God. "What are you doing?"

"Oh, just some research," Sarah Jane says quietly. "Come here." She pulls him close to her, hugs him close, smells his hair and feels his head beneath her chin. There's something not quite right about this… But she's sure she'll figure it out in the end. She'll have to.

"What's for tea?" Luke asks. Sarah Jane laughs.

"I don't know," she murmurs. "Let's go downstairs and decide."


	3. An Empire of Ice

As the Doctor sits at the kitchen table, sipping slowly at a steaming cup of strong tea, life on the Powell Estate bustles around him. Jackie gets the washing in, puts another load in the machine, breaks the sink, fixes the sink, breaks it again, declares her intention to get a man in… The Doctor had walked in the door at nine o'clock on the dot, but Rose isn't awake yet – they'd been up all night, talking about the Cybermen, about the parallel universe they'd come home from.

And Mickey Smith, gone! The Doctor presses his lips together, his hands clasping the warmth of his mug. Rose had muttered, softly, that he had no family left in this universe – no family but Rose and Jackie, that is – but it's impossible to ignore the guilt entirely. Mickey's choice, of course, but the Doctor's error.

Rose hadn't finally drifted off to sleep until some time past three in the morning, and the Doctor had quietly sidled out, dropping off on the Tylers' living room sofa. Jackie had kicked him awake at some time past seven, and since, the Doctor has stayed in place, thinking about Mickey Smith, and the Cybermen, and the horror of a parallel universe, cut off from everything else.

"That new phone's coming out today," Jackie says, by way of conversation. The Doctor glances up from his tea, his train of thought abruptly stopped in his tracks, and he looks at Jackie's face. Her blue eyes are, as ever, a little wide, as if she's twice as concentrated on the conversation than the Doctor himself is.

"New phone?" the Doctor repeats, and she slides a magazine across the table. In the centre of the page, a young blond man sits on a throne-like chair, one of his legs crossed over the other and his chin rested on the heel of his hand. He wears a periwinkle suit and a white shirt, looking every bit like a blue sky, and his smile is confident. The headline declares, in bold type: **A NEW TECH EMPIRE!** **Loki Svensson, Scandinavian tech wizard, tells us about his style, his upbringing, and Kuldeheim's latest release: the Isaz I!** He flicks through the magazine, glancing over the glossy photograph of the _Isaz I_ and its lacking specifications – this magazine is centred on personality more than tech. "This isn't a phone," he says quietly. "Technically, it's a tablet computer with telephone capability."

Jackie stares at him, blankly. "And what's the difference?"

"Processing power, mostly," the Doctor says. "As well as screen size, and—"

"Shut up," Jackie says. "Just read your magazine and drink your tea."

"Yes, Ma'am," the Doctor says mildly, and glances down to the magazine. Loki Svensson smiles out from the page.

 ** _So, how did the name "Loki" come about?_**

 _My parents loved Norse mythology, and I was brought up with it. They named me after Loki, the son of Fárbauti. He was sort of, um, a figure of chaos and discord. The other gods would often end up asking him for help, except that he'd always somehow mess it up, effectively! Sometimes by accident, and a lot of the times on purpose. He was awful._

 ** _And your parents named you after him?_**

 _Of course! He was their favourite of Norse characters, and still is._

 ** _You've met Thor, right, the Avenger? Do the two of you spend a lot of time together?_**

 _Oh, yes! Thor and I are rather good friends. On the night he came down to Earth – Midgard, as he calls it – we ended up sort of chatting, and he ribbed me a little bit. He was actually the catalyst for my using the name Loki a bit more freely: when I came to America I tended to use the name Luke, as it felt a little less strange, you know? But Thor insisted I keep on using it._

 _We meet for coffee now and then, you know – nothing fantastic. You've interviewed him before, of course, and it's easy to see he's a rather friendly man._

 ** _Tell us about the fundraiser this month, for Magda Korp._**

 _The Magda Korporacja, in its beginnings, was a corporation that came from several companies banding together – each of them produced programs, furniture, learning aids, et cetera, all intended for mutants. When Magda Korp. formed in 1982, mutant rights hadn't made the leaps and bounds they have in recent years, but even today, there's still a great need for their business. You know, mutants in our society are becoming more and more accepted, but we lack much of the infrastructure to accommodate some of their needs, in education, in transport, in business._

 _The Magda Korporacja aimed to solve that, initially – they aimed to fill in the gaps, as it were. But now, nearly fifty years later, they're so much more! The fundraiser this month is actually for the building and furnishing of a children's home in Seattle! It's just an honour and a privilege to be able to ally Kuldeheim Industries with Magda Korp._

 ** _Did you know many mutants growing up? What prompted you to take such an interest in the mutant cause?_**

 _I suppose…_

 _I don't suppose anything in particular prompted me. Shouldn't everyone strive for equality?_

The next questions are about the tablet's release, and the Doctor closes the magazine. Tapping his fingers on the scratched and abused wood of Jackie's kitchen table, and he racks his brain. He's never heard of Svensson before, and something about him seems a little off. The Doctor can't tell much about the _Isaz_ , but he can see it's far in advance of many of the technology that should be appearing around this time.

Barring Odinson, aliens aren't all that common on Earth just yet, and certainly aren't able to put themselves in especially high-up international positions – in fifty more years? In one hundred? Oh, certainly, aliens will be arriving in their droves, settling into all sorts of jobs and placements, but for now…

Taking Jackie's phone off the table, he taps a few words into Google. The fundraiser for the Magda Korporacja is happening tonight, at the Hamish Institute in Chicago.

"Hey," Rose says. She stands in the doorway of the kitchen, her hair messy around her head, wearing soft pyjamas and still with bare feet; she rubs her eye with the heel of her hand, standing on her tip-toes to stretch out her spine, and in this moment, she is the most beautiful thing the Doctor has ever seen.

"I have to go," he says.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"Today, a line spans around the block of this electronics store in central New York City," says the newscaster on the television. "The reason? Kuldeheim Industries, the leading producer of home appliances in the country, has produced the newest computer tablet. With a processing power far in advance of any desktop computer on the market, this is the fastest tablet any expert has ever seen!" The screen cuts from the news desk to a pair of hands on a flat desk, displaying the tablet computer. The hands neatly fold the tablet into a quarter of its size, and immediately the screen quarters as well, displaying its menu in the same way a touch phone might.

Despite himself, Loki feels no excitement. This is what he has been working upon for _months_ , for months: his tablet is like no other design on the planet. It's _revolutionary_! And yet here he sits, feeling… Nothing. Not even satisfaction.

"Kuldeheim Industries have really outdone themselves this time! We were sent a model of the new _Isaz I_ , and we've been running it through every test we can – its ability to process information is _phenomenal_ , and the amount of physical damage it can withstand… Well, just look at this!" A clip plays: several videos edited together, showing several Isaz models being thrown across rooms, falling from heights, even being dropped in the bath before being shown to be fully functional despite the abuse.

"You're gonna get square eyes," Darcy says. Loki looks at her. She's leaning on the jamb of the door, her arms crossed neatly over her chest. Her choice of clothing is leaps and bounds away from what she would once wear – she wears a professional blouse of soft lilac, a pencil skirt that clings to her hips and thighs, and tights of a silver colour. Her coat is still a camouflage green, of course, and she has _such a penchant_ for woollen hats and tartan caps, but her everyday wear is that much closer to fashionable concern. It had taken her less than a week to take in the majority of her professional wardrobe, but months upon months to become comfortable wearing it.

"I have never understood that phrase," Loki says in a mild tone. "This screen is oval-shaped." Darcy laughs.

"Yeah, I was just talking shit. I have Thor Odinson on line 2."

"Put him through, Ms Lewis," Loki says, and Darcy winks at him as she steps from his office and slinks out into the corridor. He's glad he hired her – Thor's recommendation was a good one, and Darcy is sarcastic, biting and heavily critical of much of what Loki does. She's also competent and surprisingly good at soothing the ruffled feathers of those Loki occasionally _accidentally_ offends.

And as for Thor… It is strange, in a way. Loki _knows_ Thor cannot know him, cannot know who he truly is, else duty would have forced him to intervene, and yet— And yet Thor seems to seek out his company. Since Thor came to Midgard a year ago, every few weeks, he had contacted Loki, asked if Loki would like to join him for a drink, or to watch him training, or accompany him to a tournament or a sports game or, on one delightful occasion, to a fashion show. Thor has no interest in him as a romantic partner (the thought rather _sickens_ Loki, even within the safety of his non-magical alias), but Loki sees the other friends he keeps with – members of the Avengers, of the X-Men. None of them seem alike to Loki Svensson.

They speak of nothing extraordinary. Thor tells him of that week's adventures, of his new friends, of missives he's received from Fandral, Sif, Hogun, Vostagg. He tells Loki not of his past, nor of his ambitions or fears for the future. They merely speak of what _is_.

"Hello, Thor," Loki says. He mutes the news on the monitor with a sweep of his fingers over his phone, and on a secondary screen, Thor's face appears. His phone is aimed rather unflatteringly up the length of his chin, and Loki can see more of his brother's nostrils than he should really like. "Thor, put your phone down. I can see your brain."

"Ha!" Thor barks out, and he places his phone, judging by the site of countertop and crumbs, on Jane Foster's kitchen counter, leaning back in his seat. "The children are very excited! Many of them have purchased your new telephone!"

"It isn't a telephone," Loki says. "It's a tablet computer with telephone capability."

"The children love it," Thor says, softly. He talks with such warmth when he speaks of Loki's various inventions, as if Loki is _Loki_ , as if Thor knows a damned thing. "Billy Kaplan and Thomas Shepherd were playing a videogame together."

"How did they get hold of them so quickly?" Loki asks, and then realizes who they're talking about. "Shepherd stole it," he says, just as Thor says:

"Thomas pilfered one." Loki chuckles, shaking his head, and he places his chin neatly upon the heel of his hand, looking down at the phone screen and meeting Thor's eyes. "Have you great excitement for tonight's celebrations?"

"It isn't a celebration: it is a fundraiser for a mutant children's home in Seattle," Loki points out. "There will be no celebrations of any sort."

"You shall drink all ale offered unto you, Loki, son of Sven, as a warrior returned victorious!" Thor proclaims, showing all his teeth. Loki smiles, looking at the screen with fondness he does not even have to feign. As a young man, he and Thor had fought alongside each other so many times, so _many_ times, and now… It surprises Loki, the sense of melancholy that settles in his chest. Once, he had been an explorer of worlds, and now here he stands, at the head of what? Perhaps one day, Loki shall have his empire, but for now, he controls naught but his own wonders, his own technologies, a small cabal of admirers.

"Very well, Thor, son of Odin. If I must." Thor hangs up the line, and Loki's smile fades slowly from his lips, replaced by the sudden heaviness that has come upon him so quickly. What is it that he misses so? He will _have_ an empire – is it truly such a shame to give up his exploration, his travel between worlds, his Skywalking, if he might have his empire? The risk of leaving Midgard would be far too great – his absence would be swiftly noted, and although he might disguise his travel from Earthly technologies, there is always a chance he might be noticed by some alien, or another magic user amongst the Midgardian mutants.

What is it Loki misses? His freedom. That is what he has sacrificed, and he knows the sacrifice to be worth it.

Pressing his finger to the intercom, Loki says softly, "Darcy?" Immediately, he hears the line click, and the door opens once again. Her eyes are wide, and her hands are clasped before her belly. His perplexity must show in his face, for she tilts her head and intensifies her stare.

"It's just that, uh, we've known each other for a year, and you've only ever called me _Ms Lewis_. Kinda figured there was some kinda crisis going on."

"Oh," Loki says. "Yes. Of course." A momentary silence passes between them.

"Is there a big crisis going on?"

"What do you do," Loki says, "when you feel dissatisfied? When you feel unfulfilled?"

"I dump the guy and go buy batteries." Loki's brow furrows.

"Is that a sexual reference?" he asks. "That isn't what I meant." Darcy sighs.

"Yeah, I figured," she mumbles. "It was worth a shot, though." Standing in her place, she watches him, then says, "Egh, you haven't got any meetings today anyway. Get your coat, Mr Svensson. We're going out."

"For a bracing walk along the promenade?" Loki queries.

"We're gonna get churros," Darcy says. "So, yeah, pretty much. Come on, chop chop." Loki feels his lips twitch into a small smile as he looks at his assistant, taking in her quiet glory.

"And this, you think, will make me feel more accomplished in my life?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Darcy says. "But we'll have churros. Sometimes, my guy, you just need to take the good with the bad."

"That's very wise," Loki says, and standing from his desk, he takes his coat. The melancholy seems to be ever-twisting in his chest, shifting and turning in on itself, and he feels the whisper of wanderlust sing in his heels. If he could just _fly_ …

But no. No, no, _no_.

He shall forget this nonsense for the time being – the two of them will get their churros, and then he will focus himself on the fundraiser later this evening.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"Are you sure?" Rose says, for the fourth time. The Doctor looks at her, grinning at her widely, and Rose hesitates before saying anything else, huddled in her hoodie with her elbows held under her palms. "You could stay here, if you wanted! You could stay here. You didn't have to take the sofa last night, you know. I mean, not that you had to… I'm just saying, you could have…" She trails off. Her tone is full of soft implication, implication the Doctor will not yet give into. What the Hell is he thinking? Not _yet_?

"Nah," the Doctor breaks in. "I couldn't stand two weeks of Jackie's cooking. You take your holiday, and I'll come back and get you, Sunday after next. On the dot." Rose smiles, looking down at her feet and shaking her head. It's beginning to drizzle, and the rain comes down and touches onto her hair, soaking into the blond locks and darkening it. She looks beautiful like this – absolutely beautiful.

"What're you going to do in the meantime?" Rose asks. Her slippers are getting wet in the rain, but she doesn't seem to mind. "I know you – you're not gonna have her stay still and just go forward two weeks."

" _Well_ ," the Doctor says, and he gives a shrug of his shoulders. "There might be a few things I want to do… Go to a few parties… There's one tonight, actually, in New York." His hands are in his pockets, and as he speaks he teeters back and forth on his heels, taking on a speculative tone, and Rose laughs. "You're welcome to come."

"Nah," Rose murmurs. "I'll have my two weeks off, nice and calm, just here. I'm sorry, I just need a little time at home. After all that—"

"I understand," he says, and he does. Her hand reaches forwards, touching for a second against his hip. The Doctor thinks about it for the hundredth, about staying here, about putting his hand on her wrist, sleeping beside Rose in her bedroom…

"See you in two weeks," the Doctor says brightly, and he slips quickly into the TARDIS, closing the door shut behind him. He steps forward, his trainers slapping against the TARDIS grating as he steps up onto the main platform, and he begins by shoving a paperclip into one of the Vortex Dials, keeping it in place as he flicks a few switches and moves over Earth. This era on Earth is a great one, he knows, full of all sorts of wonders – mutants, superheroes and all!

He takes a second, frowning slightly as he leans back against the console, and he thinks of Mickey Smith, left behind them on that parallel Earth, simultaneously so close and so far away. No superheroes on the parallel Earth. No mutants. No Avengers, no X-Men: it hadn't come up while they were in that universe, and Mickey and Rose hadn't spared it any thought, too distracted by their parallel families and the things that were the same, but the Doctor thinks about it now. What's the significance of that, he wonders? A much smaller Earth, with fewer connections…

The TARDIS touches down, and the Doctor glances down at his suit. Brown pin-stripe, blue shirt, tie and trainers – tonight _could_ be a nice night for dress-up. He could put on the old tux, fluff up his hair… Or, he could stay just like this.

Grinning to himself, the Doctor steps down from the platform and opens up the door, pulling it shut behind him. It is raining here, too, the water pounding down onto the ground and onto the TARDIS' roof. He takes on a jog, rushing out of the alleyway and up the steps of the Hamish Museum, which is on the bottom level of the Hamish Institute. He'd done a little research on it before he'd decided to come to tonight's shindig: the Hamish Institute had been founded some years ago, but try as he might, the Doctor had been unable to suss out who precisely had founded it, being directed to one shell company after another. _Tentatively_ , the Doctor has drawn the conclusion that the Hamish Institute is somehow under the control of the Magda Korporacja,

Something about the whole thing rings slightly wrong – the Doctor sees no reason a philanthropist would hide who precisely they are, and he needs to ensure this is not some scheme, some nasty plan steeped between contracts and business practices.

"Oh, sir, you're soaked through!" says an attendant as he enters the reception, a high-ceilinged room painted in blues and whites. The young man rushes behind a table, taking out a small towel from the stack prepared there, and offers it up to the Doctor. It's folded and lightly perfumed, and the Doctor smiles, taking it and rubbing it through his hair. "How long were you out there?"

"Not too long," the Doctor says. "I only, er, parked around the corner, but it's a bit heavy, isn't it?"

"It's coming down in _sheets_ ," says the young man, shaking his thick, dark hair. He has pale skin, and although he speaks carefully, not drawing his lips back over his teeth, the Doctor can see the tell-tale sharpness of his canine teeth – a mutant. "We've had a lot of complaints about not having our own parking," he adds, then seems to hesitate over it, obviously thinking the Doctor may add a complaint of his own.

"Oh, that's silly," the Doctor says. "What's life without a bit of rain, eh? What's your name?"

"Anton," the young man says, taking back the towel. "Sorry, if I'm uh… I'm new. Just got this job last week, and I didn't expect to just be thrown into a party with all these bigwigs. Oh, um, sorry, not that it's bad to be a bigwig, or anything, and I know it's for a good cause—"

"What do you know about this event, Anton?" the Doctor asks, his hands in his pockets and his eyebrows raised.

"Oh," Anton says. His eyebrows are stood on their ends, thick and brushy like a cat's tail – that's fascinating, that. The Doctor has never seen mutations develop like they have here on Earth, never seen a species react _quite_ so particularly to nuclear radiation, in such diversity, in such infinite combinations… Humans. They're just fantastic. "Well, it's pretty straight forward. It's sort of like, this big gala – the tickets were _really_ expensive, and there's this huge raffle upside for all the people who come. It's kind of… Well, it's kind of genius, really. I'm kinda friendly with Billy Kaplan, 'cause we went to the same high school, and they've pretty much done it to sort of… Make supporting mutants a kind of cool, bougie thing."

"Bougie, eh?" the Doctor repeats: Anton's eyebrows nearly double in size, and he spreads out his hands. "No, no, I'm not offended! That's pretty brilliant, Anton. And Billy – who's that?"

"Uh, Wiccan?" Anton offers. "You know, he's in the Young Avengers? He's kind of the son of Scarlet Witch, so his grandpa is Magneto."

"Right," the Doctor says, nodding his head. Magneto – now _that's_ a name he knows. Ditto for the Scarlet Witch. "Thanks very much, Anton! You've been very helpful. You have a good night, all right?" Anton smiles at him, shows those canine teeth, and as the Doctor walks away, he smiles himself.

Good kid.

"Have you got your ticket, sir?"

"Here," the Doctor says, handing over the psychic paper, and he gives his widest smile to the woman on the desk. She seems harried, to say the least. She glances over it, smiles at him, and hands it back.

"Great to have you here, Mr Smith. Here's your raffle ticket, and you have a great night!"

"Thank you," the Doctor says, genuinely, and yet with some surprise. Really? _That_ easy? Smiling to himself, he makes his way toward the staircase, being waved through by a security guard and into a lift. It's a big lift. Mirrored walls make it appear even bigger than it is, and he is in the lift with several other people. One of them he recognizes as Professor Charles Xavier, seated in his wheelchair beside a very blue, very hairy man with cat-like features. The man looks at him: the Doctor grins. "Hallo!"

"Hello," the cat-like man says. He seems bemused. "Have we met?"

"Oh, no. I love the waistcoat, though – very dapper!"

"His girlfriend picked it out for him," Xavier says, his lips twitching in amusement, and the cat-man's whiskers twitch.

"Stars and _garters_ , Charles," he hisses. "Would you stop _telling_ people that?"

"My name is Charles Xavier," he says, ignoring the cat-man's anger and extending a hand for the Doctor to shake, which he does. "And my friend here is Henry McCoy."

"You're Hank McCoy?" the Doctor asks, and he immediately grabs hold of McCoy's paw, shaking it with great enthusiasm. The flesh of his palm is soft and smooth, and tufts of fur tickle his fingers as he does so. "I've read a few of your papers on the moralistic implications of gene therapy on humans and non-humans! You're quite the philosopher!" McCoy stares at him, his yellow eyes slowly blinking, and Xavier's smile is warm and proud. Vaguely, the Doctor had had an idea of some of Xavier's students, but much of the mutant politics from this era, he's less aware of. He knows most of the basic history, of course – he knows about Magneto and his movement, as well as Xavier's staunch resistance, but he's no more up on general mutant figures than he is on the average Earth celebrity.

There are just so _many_ of them to remember!

"Thank you. And what's your name?"

"Oh, the Doctor," he says. "Just call me the Doctor." The lift begins to move, and the Doctor glances to the shiny buttons on the wall. There are a good few floors to the Hamish Institute, but it's the one at the bottom that interests him – the reception had been marked G, but there are two options _below_ G. M1 and M2 – museum floors for the Hamish Museum, the Doctor would guess… "I suppose the museum is closed tonight?"

"The Hamish Museum has yet to open at all," Xavier says. "Hadn't you realized? They're due to open in a few months, apparently. The Hamish Museum of Foreign History…"

"Foreign history?" the Doctor repeats. "That's a bit vague, isn't it?"

"They haven't settled on a proper name yet," McCoy says. "They specialize in extra-terrestial archaeology – alien artefacts found here on Earth." The Doctor's eyes widen a bit, and he can't help the smile on his face.

"Extra-terrestial, hmm? Have they got much?"

"Virtually nothing," Xavier says, shaking his head. There's no outward sign of his mutation, but the Doctor knows him to be a master of telepathy, and so he's careful not to let his mind wander too far afield. "Without meaning to sound like a crotchety old man, Doctor, it seems a bit of a waste of time."

"You don't sound crotchety at all," the Doctor says quietly. The door opens up with a soft _ding_ , revealing a magnificent hall, much larger than the reception downstairs and with a vaulted ceiling, white ribbons hanging down and shifting in the current from the air conditioners. "I'll speak to the two of you later!"

"See you," McCoy says, and the Doctor steps out.

A party. A _party!_ Taking a glass of champagne from a passing waitress with a warm smile and a wink, he takes a sip, and then regrets it. Ugh. _Champagne_ – the stuff is terrible. Setting the glass down on a nearby table and walking into the room properly, the Doctor looks around, trying to find the next person to chat to.

It's coming together in his head – the vague _suspicion_ , the difficulty in tracing the Hamish Institute to any individual, the alien technology… Well, no. It isn't coming together in his head at all, and each different factor is rotating repeatedly, letting his mind attack it from every angle. He'll work it out in the end.

But who to _chat_ to?

Scanning the room, he sees mutants and humans alike, but in the corner of the room, one man sits alone. He isn't mingling or chatting with anyone, or even doing anything apparently complicated on his phone: he's merely seated in his place and watching the proceedings. There's something strange about him. Just _looking_ at him, the Doctor can feel a sort of disturbance around him, a sort of distasteful twist to his personhood – perhaps he's one of those mutants with a time-travelling ability? The TARDIS never has liked those.

As if sensing the Doctor's gaze on him, the man glances in his direction, and the Doctor locks eyes with Loki Svensson. He feels his breath catch in his chest as he looks at him, and as Svensson looks back: the Doctor's suspicions are bolstered in this moment, because yes, yes, there's a disturbance around Svensson that doesn't add up at all. Perhaps he _is_ an alien, or perhaps some sort of mutant—

And Svensson is looking at the Doctor as if the Doctor is made of gold. He is looking at him with eagerness, excitement, with a sort of hunger – oh, that look _never_ ends well for the Doctor, and despite himself he feels a thrill inside him. In the very second he takes a step forward, a tall and cheery figure claps a heavy hand on Svensson's back, winding him, and the Doctor recognizes the form of Thor Odinson.

Svensson's look communicates spades: _Not now. We'll talk later_. Bringing two fingers to his own temple, the Doctor makes a mock salute, and Svensson's lips twitch slightly before he turns to Odinson. Because Odinson, the Doctor is sure, doesn't know. Whatever Svensson is, wherever he's from, he keeps it secret from _everybody_ …

How does he know that? He isn't sure. And yet he is so _positive_. Before he can ruminate on the thought anymore, there's a heavy rumble from below them: the whole ballroom shakes in place, roughly enough that several champagne towers fall and smash on the ground, and a few of the guests even fall down. The Doctor just manages to keep his balance, grasping hold of a table to keep it from careening into a pair of unsteady waiters. The rumbling continues for a few seconds, with yells and screams around the room, and then suddenly stops.

Above them, the white ribbons continue to ripple.

Everyone in the room is looking at each other, their faces showing confusion, uncertainty… Except Loki Svensson. Loki Svensson, in the moment where no one but the Doctor is looking at him, looks _glad_. He looks excited, as if he's just received a wrapped-up present.

Suspicions soaring, the Doctor turns to the head of the room, where a woman in leathers with thick, green hair is calling the room to attention.


	4. The Self Divided

Pushing his sunglasses a little further up his nose, Tony puts his hands in his pockets and looks up at the Kuldeheim Industries building. It had originally been office blocks, but Svensson had bought the whole thing after Kuldeheim had been off the ground for two years or so, and now it has frosted glass on its outside, recreating the logo in the silver mountains.

Tony steps inside, walking toward the security desk, and he rests his elbows on the edge of the counter as he waits for the security employee to turn around from the screen on the back wall.

"Hey," he says quietly. "Mr Svensson asked me to come in."

"Mr Stark," the guard says, and she reaches under the desk, removing a small, copper coin and passing it over to him. Tony holds the coin in the palm of his hand, looking at the image emblazoned on it: not the Kuldheim logo he's so used to, now, but an engraving of a falling star. "When you go into the lift, just press that coin to the panel marked with a K."

She doesn't seem star struck to meet Tony Stark in the least: she's a tall woman, with high cheekbones and grey eyes. There's a pause, and he flips the coin in his hand. "Thanks," Tony says.

"Mr Stark," the guard says again, and gives a short nod of her head. Tony turns and makes his way toward the elevator, glancing at his phone as he goes. It isn't even a text message, although Svensson had his number, but an _email_ – the guy is so weirdly particular.

 _Dear Tony,_

 _I imagine this comes as something of a surprise, as I have neglected to answer your invitation to keep in touch before now. We met nearly one year ago, and yet I have avoided your company. You must think me quite the cad._

 _If you would have time today, before preparing for the gala tonight at the Hamish Institute, I should be grateful if you would visit me at Kuldeheim. Speak with Vesta at the security desk, and she will direct you._

 _Once more, I apologize – I know this seems so sudden, and without prompt – but I should be so glad to see you._

 _My warmest regards,_

 _Loki Svensson_.

In the first few nights after Thor's party, Tony had thought it had been a little weird – it's not every day he gives a guy the head's up to call him, and he barely ever gives out his personal number, but he passed it onto Kuldeheim Industries. And he'd never called. It hadn't _offended_ him, no, it hadn't really pissed him off. It had just been a little weird, especially given that he knows Svensson talks so much with Thor.

But Tony's no Thor. He knows that.

Stepping into the lift, he glances over the elevator panel. The lift doors close, leaving him alone in the well-lit, copper-painted box: unlike most modern elevators, it doesn't have mirrors on the walls, but instead has intricate, curling designs carved into the walls. Above the thirty numbers for each of the floors, there is a white K on a blue glass front, and he takes the coin up to the panel, pressing it to the glass. A soft whir sounds inside the elevator's mechanism, and Tony feels the pull of the magnet as the coin clicks against the glass. Sliding down the foot of the K, it's pulled into a slot he hadn't noticed, and he hears a soft clank as the coin is pulled into a crevice.

The elevator begins to sink, and Tony wonders why he's here.

He doesn't owe anything to Svensson – they're not friends.

The numbers tick by. Down from the ground floor, past the basement level, and then to a final basement level. The screen declares "K".

The doors open, and Tony steps out, taking his sunglasses off and hanging them on the collar of his shirt. He'd come straight from Rhodey's house, where they'd been working on his motorbike together, and he's just wearing a Black Sabbath t-shirt, some cargo pants with a lot of pockets, sneakers.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Svensson must really like copper. The swirling lines engraved on the lift walls, curling in line after line, in circle after circle, continue out into the room. It's a big, square room with high walls and constantly new lines, each shining with the same copper plates and lit by warm lights. No, not lights.

"Are they oil lamps?" There's a silence in the room. Tony scans around, and then he takes a step forward, down the wooden steps and onto the lower part of the floor. They are oil lamps, hanging from metal hangers and chandeliers, and they bring into the room a warm, homely light, shining off the metal. Svensson sits cross-legged in the centre of the floor, on a cream-coloured rug woven out of wool. Scattered around him are various components that Tony doesn't recognize. "Oil lamps? What happened to saving the environment?"

"The work I do elsewhere balances it out," Svensson says softly, looking up from a mechanism half-composed between his hands. His long hair is tied up in a loose bun, and his face is lit in a way Tony doesn't normally see at home in the States. This basement can't be Svensson's main laboratory, Tony knows – it's too empty, too nice-looking, too carefully maintained. No engineer with a brain like this guy could possibly keep his workspace this clean.

"You're not wearing shoes. That's bad form for an engineer." Svensson looks down at his bare feet, which are pale, with heavily emphasized arches. His ankles look skinny, despite the muscle on the rest of him. Tony stands with his hands in his pockets, and then asks, "What's the deal, Svensson?"

Svensson sets the device gently down. His eyes remind Tony of the sea in the Caribbean, where the light shines through the water and makes all the blue look a soft green: he looks young, like this, cross-legged, barefoot and wearing one of his tailored suits.

"My assistant took me for churros today," Svensson says. He sets his hands onto his ankles, arching his back and adding, "I've never had one before."

"What did you think?" Tony asks. Svensson makes a face, turning up his nose.

"They are most unpleasant. So much dough, and so little taste." Tony laughs, and he takes a few steps forwards, sinking slowly to the rug, one of his knees drawn up to rest his elbow on, and the other outstretched on the wool. "I never called you. Strange I never heard a complaint."

"Who would I complain to?"

"Thor," Svensson says. "Perhaps Pietro." Tony frowns, furrowing his brow. Maximoff is an occasional staple in Avengers Tower, occasionally working on some kind of gadget in the main laboratory or speaking (in rather over-paced sign language for Tony's comprehension) to Clint Barton. He's an extremely quiet man in Tony's experience, and very rarely speaks unless spoken to: Tony knows the guy has switched between Magneto's Brotherhood (the guy's his _dad_ , for Christ's sake) and the X-Men over the years, and a few years back he even took a few trips with the Avengers. He was with a new team for a while – something with his sister and a few other mutants – but these days he's a solitary implement, occasionally being drafted in for a particular emergency, but mostly staying away from the action.

"How old is he? Maximoff?" Tony asks. It seems like a better question than some of the ones he wants to ask.

"He's in his seventies," Svensson says. "Why did you come? Even though I never called? It didn't rankle?"

"Sure it rankles," Tony mutters, shaking his head and feeling a slight grin pull at his lips. The amusement settles low in his belly, and he says, "Well, there are three reasons you invited me here, that I can think of." That is, that he could come up with in the hour between receiving the email and writing a reply, where he sat in his lab and bounced a ball against the wall and muttered to himself in the dark, until Pepper demanded what he was muttering about, and then they actually talked it through.

"Number _one_ – you made a screw-up with the _Isaz I_ , and you need my help to fix it." That was Tony's initial guess, until Pepper pointed out: "Except that you seem too diligent to fuck up like that, and even if you did, you wouldn't ask me for help." Svensson is watching him, his eyes focused on Tony's face, his expression completely neutral, his lips a thin line. "Number _two_ – you really want in my pants, but until now, or recently, you've had a secret boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, and you couldn't. Now, you're taking the opportunity to jump on the Tony train." Pepper had shot that idea down too, but Svensson is chuckling softly, looking down at his lap and showing his teeth as he laughs. "Or number three. You're lonely. You needed a friend."

"Perhaps I want to jump on the Tony train too," Svensson murmurs. " _And_ there's been a most dreadful error with the _Isaz I_ … Do you know, I think I might have spelt the name wrong?" Tony laughs, until his chuckle trails slowly off, and the two of them are left smiling at each other in the soft lantern light. "It isn't… _Loneliness_ , precisely. I do have friends."

"Really? Name three."

"Thor," Svensson says immediately. "Pietro—"

"Would Maximoff agree you two are friends?" Tony asks, arching an eyebrow. Svensson hesitates, then laughs.

"Alright. Well, Ms Thompson—"

"She's your assistant. She doesn't count."

"Ms Potts is _your_ assistant."

"Shit, you got me. Okay, name one more." Svensson's smile softens, his eyes growing distant.

"Alright," Svensson whispers. "Then I can't. But I promise you, Stark, it isn't loneliness that prompted my reaching out. I dwell happily in my solitude." He sounds tired. Exhaustion weighs down his voice, and he follows the words with a low sigh, putting one of his hands up and running it through his hair. "I wish to ask of you a question. Would you allow me that? Without mockery?"

"I can let you ask a question," Tony says, tilting his head slightly to the side. "The mockery thing, can't promise that." Svensson's laugh echoes off the shiny, copper walls, and he leans back on his heels, shaking his head slightly so that his hair will fall off his shoulders and settle on his back. His expression grows more serious, and he stares down at his own hands with a severe intensity.

"Have you ever…" Svensson trails off. "Have you ever reached an achievement, and found yourself disappointed by it? Dissatisfied, when it should delight you?"

"No," Tony says. Svensson's disappointment only shows in his face for a second before it fades away. "But what you're talking about… Hey, everyone feels like they're doing the wrong thing sometimes. Or like they're going in circles, I guess. _Those_ feelings, those I know pretty well."

"I thought this launch would bring me great joy. I confess, I only feel a mild sense of accomplishment, but nothing more." Tony reaches out, closing the gap between them and gently patting Svensson's shoulder – the guy's shoulder is a _lot_ more muscled than Tony had expected, and he resists the urge to let out a whistle under his breath.

"Inner peace is for monks and old ladies, Loki. Not for guys like us. All we can do is keep working."

"Thank you," Svensson murmurs. The word is full of emotion, thick with it. He sighs, leaning forwards and putting his chin on his hands. "Do you have any children, Tony?"

"Children? No," Tony says, a little taken aback by the sudden change in topic. Tony's never given much thought to the idea of having kids himself, except to occasionally freak out over a pregnancy scare, but Svensson asks the question with a sort of wistfulness on his face. "Do you?" Svensson takes in a breath that hitches in his throat, and in the last glimpse Tony gets of his face, he sees that his eyes are shining.

"No," he says softly as he stands, turning away from Tony. "Perhaps one day. Thank you for coming – I shall— I shall see you this evening, at the fundraiser." Tony could stand his ground. He could stay right here, tell Svensson it was shitty of him to call him out here just for a five minute conversation… But he doesn't mind. And this shit, the tears… Maybe the guy used to have kids. What does Tony know?

"This time, we keep in touch, right?" Svensson's laugh is soft, and slightly hoarse.

"Yes. Yes, indeed. I'll see you tonight."

"See you," Tony says, and he steps back into the elevator. The copper doors click shut behind him, and as the lift rises, he thinks of Svensson in his softly-lit, empty room, alone with a half-made machine. _I dwell happily in my solitude_. What a thing to say – no wonder the guy gets on with Maximoff. "JARVIS," Tony murmurs, and he hears the soft whir of the phone in his pocket, a quiet noise just to let him know he's being heard. "Get me an _Isaz I._ "

"Yes, sir," JARVIS says, and when the elevator opens, Tony steps out and begins to walk out.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki remains completely still, with his back to the elevator, until he hears the doors shut entirely and hears the elevator rise on its cables up and away from his laboratory. Reaching up, he brushes the pads of his fingers over his cheek, feeling the warm wetness of the tears there, the tears that drip down to wet his beard and drip down from his chin.

He hadn't intended to cry. Of course, he hadn't intended to ask as to Stark's plans for _children_ , either, and yet…

What is wrong with him? What is _wrong_ with him?

Loki feels a crawling, desperate monster inside him, feels the desperate urge to run, to run and run from his planet until there is nothing but open space beneath his feet, so he is walking on the sky itself: dropping to his knees, he lets out a low groan that gives way to a ragged sob, his palms spread on the blessedly cool ground.

"I _can't_ ," he bites at the air, and with naught but the second's thought, a second Loki appears before him. This Loki wears the old skin of Asgard, with black hair and blue eyes and pale skin. Looking at himself in this old form reminds him of Hel, and he feels tears brim anew as he turns his face away. It is pathetic enough that he should conjure a double of himself, but to grieve his daughter in the process! That is entirely mad.

"Talking to ourselves, are we? Have we regressed so far?" The Asgard-Loki asks, his silver tongue flicking over his lip, and Loki feels nothing but desperate rage, rage and— " _Impotence!_ Irrelevance! Uselessness! _"_ The Asgard-Loki declares, with glee. He laughs, tipping back his head and letting his laughter ring through the room: he speaks unencumbered by the accent Loki feigns with this form, his words coming cleanly and harshly against the copper walls. The copper, carved with a great many careful runes hidden in design after design, redirects his magic, making it as untraceable as that which he uses in his laboratory at home. But is it enough? Is it enough?

Loki launches a metal chair, which had been folded against the wall in the corner, against the far wall: it hits the copper with a loud clatter, then falls to the ground. The act of anger brings Loki's desperate fury no salvation, but instead makes him feel like a scornful child. And children! Children! Why does he keep thinking of them, again and again?

With everyone he has _met_ today, he has thought of what their children might look like. With Darcy, he imagines monstrous young toddlers, each more dangerously intelligent than the last, with manipulative laughs and dirty chins; he had an image in his mind of Pietro Maximoff holding his daughter in his arms, crooning to her the lullabies of his homeland; he thought, no less than five times in the course of his conversation with Stark, how lovely the children between him and Pepper Potts might be, if they chose to have them. How red-headed, how brilliant!

"What more do you expect?" The Asgard-Loki says, his tone flippant and superior. His chin high, his hands behind his back, he stands before Loki in armour, and Loki feels the misery of his situation in his very bones. Staring down at the stone floor, he suppresses the urge to scream. "Did you expect to be happy here? On _Earth_?"

"Yes," Loki whispers. "Yes, of course I did!" His rage raises the volume in his voice, and he clenches his fists at his sides. "Churros did nothing! Speaking with Stark did nothing! I want an _empire_!"

"You must work for an empire," The Asgard-Loki's voice echoes in the room – echoes like Odin's once had. "There is nothing for you to inherit here: you will build it yourself, and it will take _years_. You must be patient."

"I don't _want_ to be patient," Loki snaps, and when he stamps his foot on the ground, he must use his seiðr to keep the concrete from cracking beneath the force. "I have wanted for so, so long, and having worked for _six years_ upon this planet, what have I to show for it? A computer? A fridge?"

"You knew when you began that this would take time," the Asgard-Loki reminds him, suddenly on Loki's left side. He speaks directly into the shell of Loki's year, his breath soothingly cold. "You _knew_."

"But I didn't!" Loki argues. "I didn't think about how little _freedom_ it would afford me! Here I am, in this false skin, this false life, unable to use even my seiðr outside a copper-plated room, and unable to Skywalk." The Asgard-Loki's hand is on his chin, forcing Loki's head up, and Loki leans into the coolness of his fingers.

"You have Skywalked since you were a child," the Asgard-Loki whispers. "Why not leave this planet behind? Why not travel to another – to one of those many planets on which you are worshiped as god or goddess? On the planet Tamaril, you are worshiped as the emperor of the skies. Why not go there? Rule _that_ people? Why not the Fon system? Where your name is written in the stars? Why not—"

"I've begun here," Loki interrupts. "This company… Within a hundred years, I might rule the star-system. This is _modern_ , this is how it is done in these times: the Midgardians have dispensed entirely with monarchs, but like this, my influence could stretch the stars. The people will _admire_ me. Not merely obey me."

"Then why complain? What is it about this _wondrous_ world that makes you ache?" Not for the first time, Loki curses the tendency of his Asgardian form to seem so seductive. It was not a flaw he often noticed of himself with strangers, but when he is alone with himself, he notices it each time, and yet he seems to lack the strength to nip it in the bud.

"Boredom," Loki says. " _Boredom_. I can do nothing! Nothing!"

"I don't believe you," the Asgard-Loki says, his eyes shining with mischief, and his mouth curved in a clever line.

"It matters not whether you believe me, I cannot—"

"You misunderstand me, dear reflection," the Asgard-Loki says, and his hands cup Loki's face, thumbs brushing slowly over his cheeks. The Asgard-Loki is taller than Loki himself, in the form he now inhabits, and it oughtn't make him feel inferior – this is merely a _conjuration_ , intended to whip him into shape, nothing more – but he hates how he must look _up_ into his own face. "It isn't truly boredom. Deep down, you know _why_ you have never pursued an empire before now. You know why you fled Asgard, and why you wish to flee Midgard now."

"Oh?" Loki asks, arching his eyebrows. "Then please, _tell_ me why." The Asgard-Loki laughs cruelly, his teeth brightly white in the lantern light.

"Do you want me to?" the Asgard-Loki asks in a stage-whisper, leaning in. His cool breath ghosts over Loki's lips, and Loki feels his skin tingle at the sensation. Stark is available to him, and would certainly be a better candidate to work out Loki's frustrations upon than Darcy, so close as she is to Loki's day-to-day life, but now Stark is gone, and Loki's double remains right here…

"Yes," Loki murmurs. The very assent feels like a contract with some distant demon, although he knows this merely a seiðr-animated element of his own psyche, given voice and form and attitude.

"You don't _want_ an empire," the Asgard-Loki murmurs back, as if speaking to a lover. Despite the sweetness in his double's voice, Loki feels the tingling sensation turn to a crawling one, and he takes a step back. "because you _are_ alone." Smirking, the Asgard-Loki takes a step forward, closing the little gap Loki had made between them and continuing: "You are alone, and will always be alone, because your children are either dead, or they despise you. Fenrir would rip you to shreds; Hel would slit your throat at a moment's notice, and Jormungandr and Sleipnir, why, they bear not _thinking_ of." Loki feels his breath hitch in his throat – what good does it do, he wonders, to repeat to himself that which he knows? That which he knows all too well? "And of Narfi and Valí, what could they rule? Unless they ruled from their unmarked graves, bloody and in pieces—"

" _No_ ," Loki protests, but his reflection's hand closes tight over his mouth, pressing so hard against the flesh that he feels the outlines of his teeth behind his lips. When he attempts to draw away, the Asgard-Loki's fingernails dig into the flesh, and Loki is reminded of the needle that once ran through these very lips, spelling them silent with a painful golden thread. Loki is still, and silent, but his eyes are desperate. His skin is alive with heat and an itching discomfort, and he feels the disgust, the bile, rise within him as he stares at the face he once wore. The Asgard-Loki leans in, and Loki's fingers twitch at his side: what would Thor say, to look at him now, half-disgraced by his very own double? Loki feels his eyes sting, but he is determined to cry no more. "If you build an empire, Loki, who will you pass it onto? What is the point of an _empire_ with no line of succession?" He's right – the Asgard-Loki is right. He feels himself flinch, as if physically struck, and the humiliation of the moment sparks his instinct. The conjuration of the dagger is nothing to him, but by the time Loki strikes, his mirror-self has disappeared, fading from view. Loki's dagger strikes nothing but plain air.

Loki Liesmith's own honesty astonishes him, and he drops to his knees in the middle of the room, staring forwards, the dagger still clasped loosely in his hand. And isn't he right? Is his double not correct? Is this why the boredom has struck him so fiercely of a sudden? Ought he abandon his empire here and now, knowing it shall fall as soon as he is forced to leave it behind?

Loki thinks of those children he has left – Sleipnir, a horse with the wit of a man but no more; Hel, his daughter condemned to her rule of the underworld; Fenrir, his desperate son, savage, with gnashing teeth; and Jormungandr, that great serpent. Who of his children would take his empire from him, and rule it? Who of his children would love him?

Looking to the dagger, Loki considers its fine, silver blade, the sharpness of it, the beautiful craftsmanship of the bronzed hilt. What a fine blade it would be to die by.

The sound of the intercom shocks him, and Loki lets out a shuddering breath as he tilts his head in the intercom's direction to listen. "Mr Svensson, it's five o'clock. You told me to remind you when it was two hours to the party."

"Yes," Loki says, cursing the weakness in his own voice. "My thanks, Ms Thomson, I shall ready myself tout de suite." Loki's glance falls once more to the dagger, and he tilts it. The polished steel reflects Loki's gaze, and he stares into the depths of his own eyes. Their sea-green colour has been lightened by tears, and in the dim light, their colour seems somehow ambiguous, as if Loki's eyes might once have been darker. Banishing the dagger to the ether, Loki stands shakily upon his feet.

As he combs his hair with trembling hands, pulling the blond locks into a tight bun. The problem with running, he thinks, is that if he runs now, he cannot come back. To Skywalk from this planet would be to reveal himself, and might even prompt a chase – either from Midgardian authorities or Asgardian ones – and he should rather be peaceful on this planet than miserable on his own. Once upon a time, he might have relished the thought of fighting such guards and enforcers hand-to-hand, but he knows that now, facing such soldiers would only tire him, and he is so tired already.

Conjuring for himself a basin and mirror, he begins to wash his face, relishing the coolness of the water upon his heated skin. It offers him scant distraction, however, and he sighs, looking at his reflection. This face, with its light brown skin, its thick blond hair, its light beard, is so very different to the face he has left behind him, and yet he feels he sees the ghost of Narfi in his nose, and Fenrir's slavering teeth in his own.

Setting his hands on the sides of the basin, Loki stares down into the sink's drain. There shall yet be years before he has his empire – he ought not worry _yet_ about who it shall be passed onto, not when he has yet to build it.

"You know," Loki glances up, and he meets the gaze of the Asgard-Loki, who now looks out from the mirror. "There is nothing stopping you from having more children." The voice is soft – it reminds Loki of his mother's voice, although he recognizes it as his own.

"Perhaps not," Loki murmurs. The mirror and basin vanish. The party, he hopes, will be distraction enough.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"You seem upset."

"I have no great desire to be psychoanalyzed at this precise moment in time," Loki says dryly. Pietro grins at him, sliding into the seat beside him, and Loki watches him as he takes a slow sip of his drink. He wishes – oh, how he wishes! – he could risk strengthening the ale, or even that he could pilfer some of that drink kept on hand for Thor, but the risk of discovery would be too great. "How has the organisation of the party fared?"

"Oh, well enough," Pietro says lightly. "Not a man here knows who founded the Magda Korporacja. Just Wanda and myself."

"And what, pray, am _I_?" Loki asks, with a faux-archness. "I'm either not a man, or I'm not here."

"You're more of a boy," Pietro says airily, and Loki sniggers. The sound, quite undignified, surprises even himself, and he smiles privately into the depths of his drink. Despite himself, he easily finds a great affection for Pietro, with his biting wit and general misanthropy. Some weeks after they had first met one year previous, Pietro had dropped into his office with an invitation for a kosher lunch at the deli a few blocks away. Their lunch arrangements have become rather common at this point, and from what Loki can gather, Pietro likes him _entirely_ because upon their initial meeting, Loki made a rather rude comment about his father.

And to think, he once believed he shared _naught_ with the Midgardians, when he first landed here.

"Go. Be with your sister. Leave me to my _upset_ , as you call it." Saluting him rather dramatically, Pietro flashes across the room, and Loki looks back to his drink, tapping the side of the glass and watching the tiny bubbles within rise to the liquid's surface.

There is nothing to be done. The only escape he might possibly make would be through other aliens, and he hardly has a great amount of stock to choose from. Abigail Brand would have him shot. Noh-Varr would reveal him to the world. Thor's reaction… Loki feels a twist of nausea in his gut. Thor's reaction doesn't bear considering.

He feels the weight of a gaze upon his face, and glances up, looking around the room. The man examining him appears to be in his thirties, wearing a brown, pin-striped suit, and he's…

Loki feels a flicker of hope inside him, feels his lips quirk up. He must be careful with his magical field, lest he be noticed, but even with the barest wisp of magic about him, he can feel something _different_ with this man. From this distance alone, he can taste a solar wind he recognizes from several galaxies away, can smell the scent of a distant stardust, and the _energy_ clinging to him! What magic Loki has never known, but he feels his eyes light up all the same, feels himself jump inside.

Whoever this stranger is, he might be a window for Loki – a bare amount of hope. The man realizes Loki is looking back at him, and wordlessly, Loki attempts to convey his urgency that they should meet.

"Loki!" Thor says. Suppressing the urge to outright groan his frustration, he attempts to communicate to the stranger that they _shall_ speak, and turns politely to Thor, offering a smile.

"Thor," Loki begins, but any further thought is cut off entirely: he feels the floor begin to shake beneath him, and he is forced to grasp at the table to steady himself. He knows in a _second_ , in a mere second, that this wanderer must have something to do with it… Distracted from his children, from his future, even from Thor beside him, Loki's concentration takes to orbit around this new stranger…

And within him, delighted, the Skywalker – so different from Loki Svensson, Loki Laufeyson, Loki Liesmith – rejoices. This Loki, buried for so long, knows he shall soon see the stars again.


	5. Confidence Kills

Abigail Brand is standing on a table, speaking loudly over the crowd. It is only to be _expected_ , Loki supposes with a mild distaste, that she should come to a party of the most impressively moneyed upper classes in her black leathers. Loki has seen her several times over the years, either in the halls of the X-Mansion or stalking the halls of SHIELD. Just once, she had visited Kuldeheim Industries, demanding a private contact that Loki had readily assented to, and since…

"Ladies, gentlemen and esteemed guests," she calls over the crowd, and Loki smiles slightly, feeling his lips quirk up at the edges. On distant planets, where magic is but myth and fairy tale, he had once _adored_ to hear the different ways in which a culture addressed those that were not man or woman, and mostly on Midgard, he is forced to abandon such addresses as flights of fancy. But Abigail Brand, leading the Sentient World Operation and Response Department, is so many leagues ahead of this world. "Please, remain calm. Stay here, in the main hall, and our agents will check what's up – seems to us that it's just a small tremor!"

"Small?" asks a harsh, biting voice. Loki looks at the man, who is wearing round spectacles and a fitted suit, wearing the _gaudiest_ of gold rings. He has a Southern accent, and he looks around the room with great distaste. "What the Hell do you mean, small? We coulda—"

"The tremor only felt so severe as a result of the storey we're on," Loki breaks in. He sees the head of every person in the room turn to face him. "The Hamish Institute is a skyscraper, sir: assuming our proximity to the epicentre, of course we'll feel the tremor, but statistically, we are much safer than those on the streets below. Earthquakes themselves do not kill, sir. Falling rubble, rocks, et cetera – those are the true danger. Ms Brand, pray continue."

"Thank you, Mr Svensson," Brand says, in such a tone as to imply he may later be shot for his interruption. Loki's fond smile grows slightly wider. For so many years, now, he has forced himself to live by human rules, causing no harm to anybody – except for a few clever words here and there – and he's grown rather patient with the slights an individual might throw in his direction. And slights from Abigail Brand? Oh, Loki _always_ has time for her threats and implications: she does them ever so well. "Everyone, remain in this room, and continue with the party. We'll sort everything out."

After a rather lengthy silence, people begin to reluctantly speak with one another. He sees Thor looking across the room, his eye caught by the waving hand of Clint Barton, who stands with a few of the other Avengers. What, Loki wonders, are they supposed to be avenging? He supposes it isn't his place to ask.

"Loki," Thor says. "I must go."

"Go. Speak with the other Avengers: keep us safe." Thor smiles, the expression warm, and he turns away. Slipping sly as a thief from his own seat, Loki begins to move across the room, keeping a measured pace in order not to be noticed. That man, that stranger in the pin-striped suit, is nowhere to be seen.

But Loki smells him.

There are not a great amount of physiological differences between the Asgardian and the Midgardian, so similar as they are, but there are a few. There is more density to the physical flesh, of course (a paltry bullet couldn't pierce Thor's _epidermis_ , let alone his muscles and organs, and no mere human could lift him or face his brute force), and a greater lifespan, with magic in the very flesh and bones, but there is yet one more. The Asgardian sense of taste can pick up all but the most delicate of poisons, and the Asgardian sense of smell…

Perhaps Loki does not smell pheromones or feelings on the air, as the mighty Wolverine, but he remembers scents from planets that have long since burned with the ether, knows the taste of stardust as much as he knows the taste of cherries.

And this stranger leaves stardust in his wake.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Sliding between the slightly open door and the jamb, the Doctor makes his way into the staff corridor and out of the main hall. The tremor had come up all the way from the ground floor of the Hamish Institute, and from the way the building had shook, the Doctor knows they must be at the very epicentre. Stepping into a service lift, the Doctor scans the buttons, and then presses M1. Nothing happens. The little light doesn't even go out behind the button spread. Clicking his tongue in frustration, the Doctor frowns. He presses the M1 button again, and nothing happens _then_ either.

He taps the metal casing of the elevator's buttons, but nothing happens. The little light is on behind the museum buttons, but they're obviously not activated yet, probably to keep people from descending that far by accident. Well, that's easily fixed, at least – the Doctor begins to rifle through his pockets, trying to remember where he last placed his sonic screwdriver.

"Oh, I shouldn't bother with whatever gadget you have to hand, sir. Why not use me?" Loki Svensson's voice has a slight accent to it, betraying his Norwegian roots, and the Doctor turns to look at him. Svensson stands there, in his suit, with his hair tied up behind his head and a pair of oval-lensed glasses on his nose. Bifocals, from the look of them. The Doctor watches as he reaches out, pressing the button himself, and there is no DNA lock, nothing special about him, but when Svensson presses M1, the lift doors close behind him, and the elevator begins to descend.

" _Glasses_?" the Doctor asks, and he grins, grossing his arms over his chest. Up close, he feels a strange energy surrounding the other man, clinging to his body. The Doctor sticks out his tongue, tasting the biodata in the air – he failed his exams back on Gallifrey, always forgetting or mixing up DNA strands, and he usually needs to put something physically on his tongue to identify it, but human? Human biodata he knows pretty well, and Svensson _has_ it… Except it's wrong. "Bet you don't need those."

"You've got glasses in your breast pocket," Svensson murmurs. Like the Doctor himself, he shows no outward signs of being nervous or uncertain of the situation: Svennson's chin is high, his shoulders squared, and he exudes confidence. "Do you need yours?"

" _Oh_ ," the Doctor says, shaking his head. It's not just the biodata. Here, in close quarters, he feels the instinctive understanding of this man's impact on the timeline: Svensson feels _old_. Ridiculously old. Older than _him_. He's not old enough that the Doctor feels any particular _revulsion_ – there's no time energy on this guy at all, and his lifespan seems natural – but it's enough that he feels a little bit wrong, a little bit unsettling. "That's not even—" The Doctor scoffs, shaking his head. "You can see the outline of them through the suit!"

"This lift wasn't hooked into the circuitry," Svensson says casually, pushing his own glasses a little further up his nose. "Even by removing the elevator panel and adjusting the circuitry within, you'd not have been able to make it move down to the basement level, not without a length of steel wire and a firm will." The Doctor frowns, glancing between Svensson and the lift.

"So what did you do?" the Doctor asks, more curious than anything. Svensson seems to hesitate. It seems to be more than modesty, this hesitation, and the Doctor wonders how much it relates to his inhumanity.

"I channelled electricity down the elevator line, down to a control panel in the basement that retains an active basement control. The panels in the basement, inaccessible by stairwell, remain unaltered." Svensson's explanation is quiet and measured, but completely confident – he must have some personal link to the Magda Korporacja, but what it is, the Doctor couldn't say.

"Then why press the button?" the Doctor asks mildly. Svensson blinks, looking at him quizzically, and the Doctor adds, "Why press the button, if you were just channelling electricity down the line? Why not just press your hand to the wall?" Svensson chuckles.

"It wouldn't have looked nearly as good," he says, as if the answer is obvious, and the Doctor chuckles too. "What have you done to this building?" Svensson asks, his head tilted to the side. Jackie's magazine had gone on and _on_ about how handsome he is, but the Doctor doesn't really see it. Perhaps it's just how modern he is, with his manbun, his light beard, his spectacles, that make people look twice.

"What have _I_ done?" the Doctor demands, his shoulders rising. "What do you mean, what have _I_ done? What have you and the Magda Korp. done?" Svensson's eyebrows furrow, his head tilting to the side.

"The Magda Korp. is a _charity_ , sir. Do you really think they're to risk the funds they're raising to shake this building at its foundations?" The lift comes to a stop, and the doors glide open. Svensson steps out into the darkness of the room, and the Doctor frowns. The museum is in _pitch black_ , without even emergency lights on, but he hears Svensson's steps on the ground. The man walks confidently, as if he can see everything perfectly. "One moment! I'll get the lights!"

"Can you _see_?"

"Here we are," he hears Svensson's voice from across an echoing room, and he hears several switches flicked in succession. Bright lights burn down from the ceiling, and the Doctor blinks a few times to allow his eyes to get used to it. Stepping out of the elevator, he finds that they're in a large storage room, with a high ceiling. This is a basement level of the Hamish Institute, but there's a height of at least three stories between them and the ground floor above.

"Come," Svensson says. "I believe the access to the museum is this way!" And then he just begins walking! Walking away! As if there isn't an _urgency_ to the situation! It's… Strangely impressive, and for a second, the Doctor wonders if this is what it's like to be around _him_. What a horrible thought.

The Doctor runs after him.

"Have you been down here already?" the Doctor asks as they make their way through two double doors that swing easily shut behind them: the lights come on automatically, and they're permitted a sight of the museum itself, which is in a state of partial completion. Some exhibits are put together in their entirety, mounted on walls or on tables, behind glass. None of them yet have information slides beside them, but the Doctor can see what some of the artefacts are – bits and pieces of alien life, here and there.

"Just once," Svensson says. "I hadn't noticed anything untoward…" He and the Doctor stop at the same time, and the Doctor frowns slightly, inhaling. All he can feel is the strange energy that clings around Svensson, so he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his sonic screwdriver, setting it on a scanning frequency. "What is _that_?"

"It's a sonic screwdriver," the Doctor mutters, pressing the button down and listening carefully to the following whir. "This way, down to the right." Walking briskly together, the Doctor finds that Svensson easily matches his stride, and he glances at the man out of the corner of his eye.

"Was your name on the guest-list?" Svensson asks, with a wry smile on his face.

"Doctor John Smith?" the Doctor asks, his eyebrows raising, and then he grins. "No." Svensson chuckles, shaking his head, and he pushes the next set of doors open, before skidding to a rather abrupt stop; the Doctor frowns, taking a few steps forwards and coming through the door himself. They're in a central hall of the museum, now, with a high, domed ceiling and four corridors coming away from it on each side. In the centre of the room, mounted on poles and protected by glass, is a marble.

Not a glass marble, no, no, but a marble slab with carvings on it – carvings of men and women walking on water, with images of what seems like energy around their heads. The slab is big, at least ten feet high at its tallest and forty feet wide, shaped like a triangle, and the carving is positively magnificent, completed in beautiful detail.

"A pediment," Svensson murmurs. "This was once mounted upon a temple." He takes a few steps forwards, reaching out, but there's a sudden sound, a crack and a sizzle, and he cries out as he recoils. Rushing forwards, the Doctor grabs at Svensson's shoulder: Svensson's left hand is burnt, the flesh under the skin red and bared to the air. Gasping in pain, Svensson grits his teeth tightly together, and the Doctor can't help but wince as he looks at the wound. Sudden heat has burned away Svensson's top layer of skin and a little of the muscle, leaving the tendons and the bones on the palm and wrist exposed.

"You need medical attention," the Doctor says, shaking his head. "Go back upstairs, go—"

"Shush, shush a moment," Svensson mutters, curling his lip as he stares down as his ruined hand, slowly moving his fingers. He must have an insane pain threshold to wiggle his knuckles like that, even with half the nerves charred to a cinder, and— The Doctor feels his lips part, his eyes widening. It's like watching a video of a scab played at highspeed, the way that the flesh slowly rebuilds itself, layering itself again exactly as it should be, and then skin grows over the wound again like a film. Throughout it all, Svensson twists his mouth and nose, gasping and letting out soft sounds of pain, but there is no surprise, no horror – he does it as if this is entirely routine.

"What are you, then?" the Doctor asks, and Svensson lets out a sharp huff of surprise, giving him a surprisingly stern look.

"I believe we have rather more crucial concerns to consider. _Do_ sort out your priorities." Svensson chides, his blond brows knitting together. Pointing to the tablet with his perfectly-healed hand (this time from a safe distance), Svensson demands, "What is _that_?" The Doctor opens his mouth slightly, glancing from the pediment, which seems to hum with electric energy, and back to Svensson.

" _Well_ ," the Doctor says, leaning from his left foot to his right foot and then bringing his hands up in order to gesticulate with. Making a vague circular motion with his hands, he tries to think of something clever to say, and finds he can't come up with anything especially good. "It's a big alien death machine." Svensson stares at him, uncomprehending.

" _Yes_ ," he says, lowly, with a dangerous impatience. "And are you planning to do anything about it?"

"What are you?" the Doctor asks instead of answering his question, crossing his own arms over his chest and tilting his head to the side. "You're obviously _some_ sort of alien: the knowledge aside, you can see in the dark, you've got some pretty mad regenerative abilities… You've masked your own biodata, changed it somehow." The Doctor wiggles his fingers in the air, as if to illustrate the point: "You look like a human, _feel_ like a human, but you're not one. How did you do that?"

"There aren't many species that can sense biodata without some manner of chemical test," Svensson says. His apparent irritation fades somewhat, a small smirk appearing on his face. He seems _pleased_ , somehow, like this is an interaction he's won.

"But—"

"If I might make a suggestion… Perhaps we ought attend to the, as you call it, big alien death machine before we share our respective family histories? It's merely that it seems to be gathering energy somehow." Svensson wrinkles his nose as he looks at the slab of carved marble, rotating his hand upon his wrist, making the bones crack quietly in the silence of the room. "We might stop for a coffee and a chat later on."

"Who _are_ you?"

"Who are _you_?" Svensson retorts, wheeling on the Doctor and coming directly into his space, so that they are nose-to-nose, almost mouth to mouth. Svensson's breath, underneath the champagne from upstairs, smells of fruits the like of which Earth has never dreamed of, let alone seen – not in this century, anyway. Despite how close Svensson is, despite how much his body seems charged with a foreign energy, the Doctor grins. He grins widely.

And Svensson grins back.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Tony sits on a counter in the kitchen, his back leaned against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest. Beside him, Steve has his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, which are tight against his thighs and are obviously struggling to hold the muscle of his body underneath – tailored suits were never designed for super soldiers. Abigail Brand has laid out a tablet in the middle of the room, and it projects a three-dimensional blueprint of the Institute's design, showing her people in green dots as they move between floors.

"SWORD are doing rounds of the rest of the floors in teams of two, looking for any signs of trouble." Nick Fury stands with his hands on his hips, glaring at Brand with his eyebrows raised. His single eye is focused on her, and he doesn't look friendly.

"Yeah, uh huh, _well_ , SHIELD is scanning the building for biosigns with drones, from the _outside_. Ain't no point in doing patrols on foot – it's a waste of time!" Fury stamps his foot down on the ground, taking a step forwards, but Brand isn't the type of woman to be physically intimidated: she steps into Fury's space and snaps right back.

"Your drones are not equipped to search for alien life—"

"Why would you assume it's aliens!? You SWORD people, everywhere you look, you think it's aliens. You burn your morning waffle? Shit, man, it's aliens. You got no parking space? It's aliens! You—"

"Shut _up!_ " Brand snaps. She and Fury really clash when they're thrown together, and Tony had half-expected Steve to jump in and take control of the situation, but he's been pretty much silent. Tony isn't sure why _he's_ here, either – maybe because Sam Wilson isn't around, and Steve figured he needed back-up in a room full of team co-ordinators? Yeah. Tony doubts that.

"No, _you_ shut up, I—"

"I've traced the power fluctuation," says a SHIELD agent beside them, bent over a laptop and frowning at it. He tilts the laptop to the side, and then balances it on his knee again, typing rapid commands into a control screen. Fury's irritation at the interruption soon fades away as he stalks across the room, looking over the agent's shoulder. He's young, Tony thinks – younger than it seems a SHIELD agent should be, but a lot of the people in this business seem like kids to him these days. Maybe Tony's just getting old. "It's on the lower levels, in the basement."

"No one can get down to the basement," Brand says, at the same time Fury says, "The basement's closed off." That much is true, Tony knows, he'd heard a few of the security talking about it – they'd taken the lower levels right off the control panels for the elevators, to make sure no one could get down into the museum, in case of anyone using the gala to steal any of the artefacts the Hamish Museum had been collecting for exhibits.

"What's down there?" Steve asks, directing the question at the agent. The agent's eyes are wide, and he seems anxious to be in his position, but when Fury gives him a glance, he begins to talk, his head held high and his shoulders straight, as if he has to remind himself to make his posture good. Some of the SHIELD agents are soldiers, but this guy, he isn't a soldier. Tony can clock a soldier a mile off. This guy's a boffin – a natural scientist, meant to be kept away from the field so he can get his best work done. He's not American, either, but it doesn't surprise Tony too much: SHIELD seem to grab up the best and brightest from all over the world, and although they're not quite as varied as the SWORD staff, they're not limited to the homegrown stock of potential engineers, scientists and soldiers.

"Uh, we didn't go down there," the kid says, shrugging his shoulders. "It isn't relevant to us, the museum – the manager cut off access to protect the exhibits, and there's no way up or down."

"What do you mean, no way?" Tony asks. "What about the stairs?"

"There are no stairs, sir," the kid says. He hesitates, glancing to Brand and to Fury, and then says, "I was talking to one of the archaeologists who works down there, and he was saying there's no stairs at all. They have lifts for staff, and they have loading bays coming off the lifts: when the Hamish Museum opens, visitors will enter via an ancient teleport system built by the Inhumans. It's part of the tourist attraction." The guy seems to get excited at the very thought, and Tony has to admit – it's one way to get people more actively interested in archaeology.

"What's your name?" Steve asks, his voice very quiet.

"Fitz, sir, Leopold Fitz."

"Fitz, this teleport system… Is it online yet? Could that be causing the power fluctuation?" Steve asks. His brow is furrowed, and Tony can see the lines forming on his forehead.

"No, sir," Fitz says immediately, shaking his head. As he does so, his tightly curled hair shifts on his head with the vigorous movement. "They're testing the system at an out base somewhere in Alaska, so they can make sure it's working perfectly before they install it here. But from my data here, the fluctuation is surging, getting a little more—" Fitz stops. He stares down at his computer, his mouth open, and it seems like he's forgotten entirely where he is.

"What is it, kid?" Tony asks, even as he shares a concerned look with Steve.

"It's— There's someone in the lift."

"What?" Fury demands, and he turns Fitz' computer to face him, his single eye squinting down at the screen. Fury's jaw is set, and Tony can see the way he tightens his fist at his side. Tony glances between Fitz' pale features and Fury's angry ones. "Two life signs," Fury barks to Brand. "Moving down and down… Why didn't your drones catch that?"

"They're not tracking the elevator shafts," Brand mutters quietly. "Do we know who they are? Have we got security footage?"

"It's a staff elevator," Fitz mutters, sheepishly shaking his head. "I—" The double doors open with a clatter, and Tony feels the sudden _whoosh_ of air over his face, but when he looks to the doors, they're closed and locked again. Fury stands up straight, scanning the room, and Tony lets out a quiet sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Don't play the Invisible Man, Maximoff," Tony says to the room at large, and Maximoff stops flitting about the room and avoiding a look from the naked eye, instead skidding to a stop beside Abigail Brand. Tony looks at Maximoff, taking in a quiet breath, and glances to Steve: Steve is looking at Maximoff with a mix of distrust and uncertainty. "You here for a reason?"

"This room is sound-proofed," Maximoff mutters, tapping his fingers so quickly on the side of his thigh that they're just a blur against the blue fabric of his suit. His blue eyes are intense, and he looks just like his father, for the barest flash of a moment. There's a difference, of course: Tony might not like Maximoff, all the time, but he trusts the guy. He'd never trust Magneto. "You, boy. What's your security clearance?"

"Uh—"

"Don't answer that," Fury mutters, stepping slightly forwards. The intention, Tony guesses, is to intimidate Maximoff a little, but he's about the same height as Fury, and he doesn't seem deterred in the least. "Maximoff, what—"

" _Hush_. Can you be trusted with a secret, child?" Maximoff is across the room, staring directly down at Fitz. He's a tall man, broad-shouldered even though he's lithe in build, and Fitz stares up at him, gaping like a fish.

"Yes, sir. Mr Maximoff." Maximoff turns to face the rest of them, his eyes flitting at high speed between Steve, Tony, Brand and Fury. Tony's never seen the guy look this anxious outside of when Wanda's dragging him somewhere for a family dinner, and he feels his heart pulse a little faster behind the Arc reactor whirring in his chest. What the Hell is he gonna say, that Magneto has something to do with this?

"Firstly, I am the founder and CEO of the Magda Korporacja.," Maximoff says. He says it almost casually, as if this is an ordinary introduction. Tony glances around, and sees the others look about as shocked as he does. "The party tonight is of my organising, albeit through a great many surrogates and shell companies." All five of them, Tony included, are staring at him. Maximoff is not known in _any_ circles for his self-control or for the particular kindness of his heart – he's a harsh man who likes to keep to himself, and the idea that he'd be running _any_ kind of business blows Tony out of the water.

"Is there a reason you're telling us this now?" Brand asks lowly.

"There's an energy disturbance coming from the basements, but no one ought be able to reach the lower levels—"

"We know," Fury interrupts, his tone biting. Maximoff looks ready to snarl at the other man, but he holds himself back, pressing his thin lips together before he continues.

"There are various elements of ancient technology down there, but naught that should cause such a disruption. My head archaeologist, Doctor Alraune, is leading a dig in the Australian outback, and cannot be contacted. We have one or two of our staff here, but they're all interns or assistants, here to learn more than to deliver their expertise. The bulk of our scientific team is with her: none of them wanted to come to a party of the rich and useless when they had an opportunity for something so _crucial_." Maximoff seems to realize what he's said, and says in a very mild, but not especially heartfelt tone, mostly to Tony: "My apologies."

"Thanks," Tony says, unconvinced. "So you don't know what the deal is either?"

"No," Maximoff says. "But it would take me little more than a few minutes to re-attach one of the elevators to the basement levels – it's something that would take an engineer a few hours, but I can do it."

"You're an engineer now, Maximoff?" Steve asks. "What must your father think?" Maximoff recoils slightly, looking at Steve as if the other man has actually hit him. Tony frowns slightly: even he thinks it's a little bit of a low blow, but there's no love lost between Steve and Pietro, from what Tony's heard.

"I don't think my father thinks about me, Captain," Maximoff says in a reservedly polite tone. "If it's all the same to you." Steve scowls, uncrossing his arms and looking like he's about to go on, but Fitz' computer fizzles with sudden static and whiteness across the screen, and then the monitor blinks into a camera feed.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki examines his hand, slowly flexing his fingers and thumb, then shifting his wrist gently from side to side. He feels the soft pulse of seiðr in the new flesh, but the burst of energy will be disguised by that which is coming from the pediment in slow, roiling waves, and Loki feels it pulse through his chest with every thrum.

"Some kind of security system," Loki says mildly, turning away from the Doctor and stepping toward the pediment. He makes sure to keep back from the energy field slowly building around it, his lips pressed together, his brow furrowed. The carvings are slightly crude, with frowning faces and slightly off proportions: limbs that are too long, necks too wide, and heads slightly too large or too small. "These are very early carvings," Loki murmurs quietly. "They're not human." Doctor Smith, who had been bent over a computer console that will one day declare all the details of the exhibit, turns to glance at him.

"What?"

"You didn't look very closely, did you?" Loki asks mildly, and Smith lets out a low chuckle.

"Little distraction," he says in response, gesturing to Loki's hand, and then Smith straightens up, looking at him thoughtfully, analytically. Loki so does _love_ to be analysed. He turns away from the computer console, instead looking to the statues upon the pediment, and Loki can see him frown. "You're right. This is _much_ too old to have this sort of sophistication… Three-dimensional sculpting like this, with separate legs, arms— But this is tens of thousands of years old."

"And if you look to the details," Loki murmurs, pointing to the figure of one woman at the very centre of the pediment. She has something between her shoulder blades, and Loki sees the curving shape of the feathered wings, although the carving itself is crude. Another has claws in place of fingertips, and it has a different shape to its face.

"That's a Silurian," Doctor Smith murmurs, coming over and standing right next to Loki, looking over his shoulder. He frowns, staring at the surface of the sculpture, and adds, "They're more complicated, you see. Look, the sculptor's tried to form the flares in the skull, the different ridges."

"I fear I'm unfamiliar with the Silurians," Loki says mildly, but he recognizes other elements of the varied sculpted figures. Another figure has lines upon his skull, not quite as well-defined as that of the Silurian figure, but enough to show itself as the form of a Skrull. The Skrulls, why, Loki is _comfortably_ acquainted with them.

Looking upon this earthly temple, so far removed from the capabilities of any humans, Loki feels astonished to look upon something so very old, and yet so carefully constructed. The power is still radiating in slow, rhythmic waves, and Loki feels it rove over his skin like a breeze. He holds up a hand, letting out a little tendril of seiðr and reaching out with it, seeing a shield flare visibly around the pediment, in a soft lilac.

"Ah," Loki says. Smith glances to him.

"What?" he asks.

"Look at the shield," Loki whispers. He spreads the tendril out, and he feels the ever-so-slight pressure of the lilac shield of energy against the tendril, like something pressing against his palm. "Is it merely my imagination, or…?"

"It's expanding," Smith confirms, and Loki reconsiders the burning, savage agony of the energy eating through his flesh, right down to the very bone. Perhaps, were he wearing his true skin instead of this weak, human coat, it might have taken longer, or may not even have eaten through more than the surface level. Or perhaps not – he was lucky to have drawn away so quickly. "Oh, no. Oh no, oh no…" Smith is slowly shaking his head, and he steps back toward the computer console, tapping against the monitor and pressing some sort of sonic device against it, letting it whir against the casing.

The monitor flares into life, displaying a crude informational screen. There is no formatting to the piece of text, no images or aesthetic elements: instead, it is merely green text on a black screen, still unedited.

 _This pediment was retrived from an undersea ruin in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Although digs are still underway, we believe this pediment used to form the front of the temple of (name of island when agreed on). The island was populated by the early Inhumans, as well as other non-human races that inhabited earth at the time.. by being on the island, they were safe from early humans that wanted to hunt/kill them (Doc Alraune says sentence is too inflammatory, rewrite)_

"Well," Loki says dryly. "So long as it was _retrived_."

"They obviously didn't have spellcheck," Doctor Smith says impatiently, and he scans the text again, glancing from the screen up to the pediment. "Doesn't make any mention of a security system, though… Alright, what's this?" Smith taps a few pieces of the screen, and it defaults to the desktop of a basic operating system, a touchscreen keyboard taking up around a third of the monitor. He begins typing rapidly with one hand, the other holding his sonic device to the screen, and the screen shows footage of a kitchen, but no audio. It's one of the kitchens from upstairs, it seems, and Loki recognizes Pietro on the screen, as well as the strapping form of Nick Fury.

"Have you hacked a computer feed from upstairs?" Loki asks: spreading both hands out, he lets a few tendrils of seiðr escape his palms and sets them to rotate over the surface of the energy field, keeping it visible even as he moves away. The lilac bubble is easily a few inches broader than it had been when Loki had first touched it, and he comes to bend over the screen with Doctor Smith.

"They can't see us," Smith says, tapping the monitor and scrunching up his nose. "I want to talk to them, but there's no camera here – no security cameras down here yet, either, so—" Reaching into his pocket, Loki ignores Smith as he continues to ramble, and then he pulls out his Isaz. Unfolding it into its tablet form, he neatly separates it in half, clipping one half to the top of the monitor and holding the other in his hand. Smith's complaints and mutterings trail off as Loki opens the camera on the separate half of his tablet, and on the half in his hand, begins to synchronize the feed with the monitor.

"Is that the _Isaz I_?" Smith asks, and Loki chuckles, giving a shake of his head.

"No, this is _my_ tablet. It's rather a few steps ahead of the _Isaz I_ , I'm sorry to say, although aesthetically, they're similar: I continuously add to it, change pieces out or rebuild it." The separate parts of his tablet can function independently, either in halves or in all four quarters, and although most of the features are as yet experimental, separating the Isaz into a camera and control is something he's well-practised with. "This is the Isaz Mark… Fourteen, I suppose."

Doctor Smith is smiling at him, smiling with a sort of lopsided, brilliant grin, and Loki glances at him as he sparks the camera feed into life, affecting it to appear on the screen upstairs. As it loads, Loki looks at the other man quizzically, and Doctor Smith just shakes his head: the sonic device is dropped neatly into one of his suit pockets.

There are many faces in front of the screen, now – Loki sees Tony Stark and Pietro, but then Steve Rogers, Abigail Brand, Nick Fury… And a young boy, presumably one of Fury's agents. It's a great relief to see Pietro in the room, but Loki knows what it means – Pietro must have told them about the Magda Korporacja.

"Hallo," Smith says. "Now, before you jump to conclusions—"

"What the Hell are you doing down there?" Fury snaps out. "There's an energy… What the Hell is _that_?"

"It's a big, glowing energy field," Smith says.

"It appears to be some sort of ancient shield," Loki says, looking into the camera. "We're wary of getting too close, but we think the forcefield is dangerous to those it hits – fiercely corrosive. Some sort of protection. Pietro, what do you know about this pediment?"

"What the Hell are you doing down there?" Brand demands.

"I saw a handsome man suspiciously leave the room, and I followed him. You can hardly blame me," Loki says with a wink, and he sees Tony grin on the screen. Pietro's lips twitch minutely, although the expressions of Brand, Fury and Rogers remain stony. But despite the slight mistruth, it isn't entirely a lie: for so many years, Loki has put aside his title of Liesmith, forged in silver and blood, but now he can hold it in his heart once more, and oh, what a _rush_ it is. "Pietro?"

"The pediment was retrieved from an island in the Atlantic, some few hundred miles off the coast of Ireland. We have workers out there now, but it's not exactly _easy_ – the vast majority of our workers need to be able to amphibious at _least_ , as the pressure is too much for most of our equipment, and they're working under his highness, the Prince Namor. There's… A lot of red tape." Pietro is speaking rather fast, and then continues, "The temple itself has yet to be recovered, but there shouldn't be any sort of energy field: my team wouldn't bring anything out if it was still functioning. That pediment is over twenty thousand years old, and with no energy source—"

"Did your sister look at it?" Loki asks. Pietro stops short, as if Loki's interruption has put a brake on the very workings of his quick-working brain. Loki cannot display the full workings of his knowledge, but such an ancient machine will work in ways Loki himself is familiar with – it must power itself with the natural flows of magic through the universe, not with electricity. Latent energy found in the air, travelling through what the Midgardians call their ley-lines, but permeating the very atmosphere.

"Hallo," Smith says, waving onto the screen and interrupting the current train of thought, and he offers them each a winning smile. He has a handsome smile, Loki thinks – a handsome smile, and such deep, dark eyes. Old eyes, ancient eyes. "I'm John Smith—"

"There was no John Smith on the guest list," Pietro says immediately.

"He's a quick one, isn't he?" Smith asks Loki, and Loki snorts.

"You've no idea," he mutters, thinking of the way Pietro Maximoff flies from one side of the room to the next at any given time, and he sees the way Pietro scowls on the screen. Glancing back, Loki sees the little burst of seiðr he'd sent in orbit of the field, enough to colour it lilac, disappear with a soft crackle. The field is invisible again, now, but Loki can feel where it is now that he knows its energy.

" _Anyway_ ," Smith continues, "Loki here is right – this tablet here has an energy field that's expanding pretty quickly. Every minute that passes it's growing an inch or two, and we do _not_ want it leaving this room."

"We haven't got time for this," Fury snaps on the screen, and Loki looks to him as he brings a communicator at his wrist to his mouth. "Get the alpha team into the main museum hall. Derrick and Hansen, go."

"Wait, wait, wait—" Smith says, but before he's finished, there is a soft _hiss_ of energy in the corner of the room, and the two of them turn to look at it. The energy is slightly distasteful, giving off a burnt sweetness that lingers in the air, and Loki pinpoints it to the cuffs each of the two soldiers wear – basic teleportation devices. How very primeval.

"We're here, sir," says the taller of the two young men, "We've got eyes on Mr Svensson and the other guy."

"Smith," Smith says helpfully, and he puts his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket, looking over at the two young men. They're carrying rather large sub-machine guns, which he looks to with a mild disapproval. "Do you need those?" The young men arm the weapons, and hold them up, aiming at Smith and Loki respectively. Loki glances to the energy field, which is slowly expanding – the young men had teleported to be only a few inches away, and Loki _could_ , he supposes, warn them back, but he must _know_ what the field will do.

He reaches for his half of the tablet. "I need to run some analyses," he says into the camera, and before any of them can protest, he picks it from where it's clipped to the monitor and clicks it back into his tablet.

"What are you doing?" demands the shorter one.

"I need it in its entirety to run an analytical programme," Loki answers, flattening his tablet into a whole piece and beginning to rapidly type onto the screen with one hand, holding it steady with the other. The camera on the back adjusts itself, letting out a beam of light, and the light scans the pediment's front. "Stay where you are. There's a deadly energy field right in front of you."

"What are you going to compare that to?" Smith asks, looking over his shoulder and frowning at the screen as Loki's tablet creates a three-dimensional recreation of the pediment. As he scans over Loki's quickly written coding and the image itself, Loki notes the intelligence in Smith's dark eyes. Hansen and Derrick are speaking amongst themselves, exchanging code words and order numbers, and Loki knows they won't heed his warning – young, soldier types, why, they think they know everything. Thor was like that, once upon a time.

"I'm not going to compare it to anything," Loki says, and he taps twice on the image, showing an image of the hollow inside. "Ah, there we are…"

"How could they have missed this?" Smith asks, staring at the re-creation of the pediment's insides, and Loki shakes his head, giving a quiet tut. There are lines after line of hieroglyphic inscription, mingled with the occasional Skrull symbol and a third text that Loki himself does not know by heart, but becomes slowly comprehensible as the Allspeak takes effect. Silurian, he would wager.

"They don't have the technology – there's a protection around the pediment, so that it reads as entirely solid, and without bypassing it—"

Loki glances down at his Isaz as it begins to ring.

 _Tony Stark is calling you,_ the screen declares in silver text, and Loki, feeling rather put-upon, accepts the call. The screen bursts into life, displaying Stark first and foremost, seated on a stool, with Rogers looking over his shoulder.

"Hello, darling," Loki says mildly.

"You're using the wrong camera. I can't see your face, you idiot," Tony says, looking amusedly at his own camera as if Loki is some sort of luddite, and Loki frowns. Tapping the button to swap cameras doesn't seem to do anything, and he mutters curses to Facebook under his breath as he lifts the camera a little higher, trying to see if he's _somehow_ pressed the wrong button. The two soldiers are in the camera view, and Loki sees they look rather incensed.

"Are you on the _phone_? Sir, put that down!" the taller one orders, and as one, Hansen and Derrick step forward – right into the energy field. Smith is already putting his hands out, letting out a cry for them to stop, but the two of them burn as they step into the way of the field, and they haven't even the time to scream. They burn so quickly that all they leave behind them is a little burst of grey smoke and wisp of black dust on the air, and Loki wrinkles his nose.

"Did you see that?" Loki asks, quietly. The camera finally switches to displaying his own face, which he carefully ensures displays shock and grief over the fates of the two idiot soldiers, lest someone find him any more suspicious than he already is.

"Yeah," Tony says, and he turns to Rogers, who is shaking his head. "Are you okay down there?"

"We thought it best not to get into the path of the field," Loki lies. "It seems our instincts proved correct." Smith snatches the Isaz away from him like a child taking a toy, and Loki suppresses the sudden urge to scold him.

"Have you had any luck contacting the archaeologists who worked on this?" he asks.

"Who the Hell are you, buddy?" Rogers demands, and Loki rolls his eyes. The camera is on Smith's face, and Loki steps in front of Smith, gesturing over the Isaz.

 _Hang up_ , he mouths. Smith gives him a stern glance, and looks back to Rogers. "Look, you can ask questions about who I am later. For now, I'm a man that happens to be down here, where I can work on the problem. This energy field is slowly expanding, and it seems to burn up everything it touches."

"It isn't burning the floor," Loki says, thoughtfully, turning away. "But it burned up their guns, their clothes…" He reaches down, carefully unfastening his tiepin, and throws it into the path of the field: it melts upon the air, the silver evaporating into the ether. "Objects on their own also seem affected, but what about something with its own energy source? Give me that."

"Oh, don't do it," Tony says, his voice raising. "Don't you do it!"

"I'm splitting the Isaz in half," Loki says, in the voice of a TV chef narrating his actions. The faces on the screen halve in size as he splits the Isaz upon its seam, and he can see Tony shaking his head and bouncing in his seat as Loki splits the other half of the Isaz into halves again. One quarter he slips into his pocket: the other, he throws into the field.

Initially, he braces himself for the sizzle, but it does not come: the screen hovers in the midst of the field, crackling as energy overloads its circuits, and Loki raises his eyebrows, looking on in curiosity as sparks spit away from the Isaz quarter. His version of the Isaz works from a battery, but can take charge from alternative sources – Loki has powered it by magic in the past, or from latent nuclear radiation, but whatever ancient energy is coming from this pediment, it supersedes his carefully designed buffers and controls. With a quiet whine, the quarter of the Isaz goes dark, and Loki feels the vibration from the one in his pocket.

"New notification," Smith reads off, quietly. "Segment 3 is offline. Oh… The call dropped. They must have hung up."

"No," Loki replies, taking back the Isaz. "Segment 3 hosts the primary satellite capability, and the other segments can't work internet access without special permissions enabled. I just thought it would look suspicious if I hung up of my own accord." Closing the Facebook Messenger tab, he returns to his recreation of the text inside the pediment, frowning deeply. It is most certainly magical in nature, but Loki can hardly blame the archaeological team for missing that – the pediment certainly appears solid, and he imagines there is some warding to keep anybody from realizing it is hollow. Smith is frowning at the energy field, and he is wearing the glasses Loki had noticed in his pocket now, squinting through the lenses at the pediment.

Taking a step back from the energy field as it comes a little too close for comfort, the corpse of Segment 3 hanging uselessly in the air just before him, Loki frowns down at his Isaz as his program digests its recreation and begins to show only the text upon the screen. Smith is holding up that sonic device again, examining the field carefully and ensuring he keep out of its reach. Loki scans the security protocols, examining them with care: now that he sees them laid cleanly out upon the screen, like this, they seem fit for purpose, and not unusual compared to any other protocols he's become familiar with in the many centuries he's been alive.

"Ah, here we are, Doctor Smith," Loki says, tapping the screen and zooming in on a particular line of text. "LAST ACTIVATION [32128… 2.34] 192 THREATS DETECTED, PROTECTIVE FIELD TRIGGERED. The first few lines are some sort of date system I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with, but 192 seems to be the number of threats it considers still active."

"192?" Smith repeats, tilting his head to the side and turning away from the device, which ceases its quiet whirring. "What's significant about that number? Is that how many guests are upstairs?"

"No," Loki says, shaking his head. "There are around 250 guests, and staff, including the security, bring that number up to perhaps 300. Let me see if there's a number of active threats… Ah. 224." He tries to bring up a specific list of attributes that surround the threats, but nothing comes up: they all come under a lump category that is only specified by a number rather than a descriptor.

"224… And all of these are living people?"

"I _think_ so," Loki says, twisting his mouth. "Although I make no promises in that regard." Glancing to the pediment's design once more, he frowns. "It didn't work on me, the field, the way that it's supposed to."

"Well, you're not human," Smith says, shrugging his shoulders. "The system didn't know what to do with you."

"I'm _not_ human, no," Loki agrees. "But my biodata says that I am. It's only once one cuts me open that I appear a little wrong." Smith glances up, pushing his spectacles up his nose. They rather suit him, frame his face – he looks even more handsome with them on. "Upstairs, a majority of the guests are human, with some of them mutants, others, like us, aliens…" Loki glances between the fragment of his Isaz and the space where his tiepin had burnt up, nodding his head.

Loki looks up, grinning at Smith. "I believe we have a solution." Smith's eyebrows raise, his lips quirking into a smile.

"Oh? What's that?" When Loki shoves Smith in the chest, throwing him into the path of the field, Smith doesn't even have the chance to protest: when he cries out in pain, Loki can't help but laugh.


	6. Questions Asked And Answered

The blow to his chest sends the Doctor off-balance, and he stumbles back into the path of the field, unable to pull himself forwards. He braces himself, scrunching his eyes tightly shut as he stiffens in anticipation of the searing pain… Which seems to come only from his feet. What?

" _Agh!"_ he cries out, and he stares down as his shoes burn up around his feet, leaving him only in mismatched socks, and he stares at Svensson, who has the gall to smile at him. He's _laughing_. "Those were new shoes! You could have killed me!"

"Don't be ridiculous," he says softly. "You're not human, Doctor Smith: the field isn't programmed to hurt you. Look again at the people on the pediment… None of them were human. They had to keep themselves safe from their human enemies." The Doctor looks between the pediment and the computer console, and he grins.

"Oh, that's _brilliant_ ," he says, and he runs around the back of the pediment, holding up his screwdriver and activating the mechanism that lets the stone part ways to let someone examine the inside. "The shoes burned _because_ they were new."

"Too human," Svensson agrees. "I imagine the shield tests energy or lingering DNA on objects, so that projectiles or the like couldn't permeate its protections. I use my Isaz all the time, with my true capabilities, and I imagine you've worn that suit a lot – the new shoes, however—"

"And your tie-pin, which you only wear on special occasions?"

"Burned up," Svensson says, nodding his head as he bends down on the ground, picking up the burned-up piece of his tablet and dropping it into his pocket. This man, the Doctor thinks, threw him into a searing energy field on nothing but a _hunch_ – and yet despite himself, the Doctor finds himself respecting the man.

"Why did it burn you? I could tell you weren't human—"

"I must have confused the system," Svensson admits, shrugging his shoulders as he steps around the field, looking (from a distance) over the Doctor's shoulders as he reaches into the recesses of the pediment, examining the system within and looking for an off-switch. As he looks at the foreign text, he feels the TARDIS translate it before his eyes, and he frowns as he scans over the system notes. "It was attempting to burn away human elements, but almost as soon as it touched me, it slowed down. Mine is hardly an ordinary case."

"A-ha!" the Doctor proclaims, and he presses his sonic screwdriver against a specific panel. With a soft _click_ , the energy field disappears, and he climbs out of the pediment's back, grinning. "There!"

"Excellent," Svensson proclaims, clapping his hands together, but his hands are soon crushed between his chest and the Doctor's as the Doctor pulls him into a crushing hug. Svensson seems confused and stiff, initially, but then he relaxes, wrapping his arms around the Doctor's shoulders and hugging him back. His soft chuckle is warm against the Doctor's ear, and the Doctor smiles as he pulls away.

"You could have _killed_ me," he repeats, looking into Svensson's eyes for any sign of regret: there is none. There is merely a quiet amusement.

"I shouldn't do that. You're my new friend," Svensson says softly, and he smiles. The smile is warm, and it seems natural on his face, but the Doctor cannot help but get the impression that that smile, that _exact_ smile, has been painted on cave walls and wrought out in statues. There's an ancientness about it, an age that shouldn't be bound up in a person on Earth. "Let me make a deal with you."

"A deal?" the Doctor asks, arching his eyebrows. Svensson's tone is flirtatious, but the Doctor pretends not to notice, instead letting the other man lean slightly on his shoulder, keeping close even though the hug is over. "What?"

"We'll go upstairs, and I'll provide a rather fabulous distraction. In the chaos, you can slip away, lest you be interrogated by SHIELD, or SWORD, or any of the other ridiculously named organisations in the vicinity." _Make a deal with the Devil_ , says a voice in the back of his head, the same naughty voice that belongs to a man he both no longer is, and always will be.

"And in return?" the Doctor asks.

"You'll join me for a drink this evening," Svensson offers, warmly. "We might discuss our family histories, as I previously mentioned?" The Doctor chuckles, and then he slowly shakes his head.

"I'm sorry, Loki. I've got to get going – places to be." Something changes in Svensson's eyes: the Doctor had expected anger, but instead, he sees a distant sadness, a melancholy. Loneliness, the Doctor thinks – what an emotion. Not one he's a fan of himself.

"Then consider the deal off the table," Svensson says, in a diplomatic tone, with a polite bow of his head. "The distraction shall be naught but my gift to you." He takes his hand from the Doctor's shoulder, and begins to lead the way toward the lift. As they move, the Doctor looks down at his socked feet, his hands in his pocket, and he examines Svensson, looking over him.

"Who are you?" the Doctor asks, and Svensson smiles a private smile, looking down at his own feet.

"I was many people, once upon a time. Now…" Svensson seems to search the air in front of him for an answer, and when none reveal themselves, he lightly shrugs his shoulders. "I am nobody. I am anonymous."

"Anonymous? Your face is plastered on a hundred magazines out there," the Doctor points out. "How anonymous is that?"

"This isn't my face," is all Svensson will say, and he steps into the elevator, gesturing for the Doctor to join him. They endure the ride to the top of the building in silence, and the Doctor wonders if Svensson will make good on his promise.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Nick Fury has given the room the "all-clear", declaring it is once again safe to enjoy the party. The energy source, Thor had heard Steven Rogers murmuring to Natasha, has been neutralized, but they have yet to retrieve Loki from downstairs – Loki and the stranger. When the double doors burst open, Thor immediately gets to his feet, grateful to see Loki safe and well… But that is not what he sees.

Loki staggers as he enters the ballroom, his hair mussed and falling out of his bun, strands of it hanging down around his pale face. His eyes are red, his cheeks tear-stained, and there's an unhealthy, green tinge to his skin; his hands are shaking visibly, and around the room, party-goers stand shocked and staring, their eyes all on Loki, and not a single person steps forward to help him.

His eyes are defocused, Thor sees, and although he glances around the room, Thor doubts he sees anything at all. His shaky legs buckle, and Loki's left leg gives way: Thor pushes past a few women in richly-gauzed dresses, men in ill-fitted suits, and he catches the younger man by the shoulder as he falls like a dead weight to the side.

Scooping Loki up before he hits the floor is a matter of ease, and Thor is careful about supporting his head against his shoulder as he takes him into an anteroom, where a few excess chairs and tables are stacked up against the wall. He lowers Loki onto the ground, flat on his back, and presses his fingers against Loki's throat. His pulse seems a little weak, Thor unbuttons the top button of his shirt, loosening the younger man's tie and setting it aside.

"Close the door," Thor orders cleanly as Tony and Steven come into the room, and he sees Steven push the door closed with a click. Loki is stirring, and Thor puts his hand on his forehead, testing his temperature, but he feels neither especially cold, nor especially hot. "Loki. How do you feel?"

"You took my tie off," Loki says blearily, one of his hands going limply to his neck, his fingers brushing over the hollow at his collarbone. Thor glances to the side as Tony comes over, carefully crouching down next to Thor where he knees, and Loki's pupils slowly stop their erratic movements, his lips parting slightly. He looks past Thor and Tony, his gaze coming in to focus on the figure of Steven against the wall: his arms are crossed over his chest. Thor knows the man is gentle at heart, but the whole situation of the day has undoubtedly left him in a sour mood.

"What happened?" Steven asks, his tone dark. Thor focuses on Loki, offering his arm and letting Loki carefully pull himself into a sitting position. Loki sits with his knees up, his elbows rested on them and his head tipped forwards. "The call cut out."

"I attempted to run a scan, and the energy field took out the other half of the tablet. Lost my signal, I'm afraid. The man with me, Smith, he managed to turn it off. The pediment is part of an ancient security system, and prevents humans from coming within its bounds, and—" Loki's hand goes to his mouth, and the green tinge returns to his features: Thor furrows his brow. The younger man looks sick as a bilgesnipe, his head lolling a little on his shoulders, and when he gags, he brings the back of his hand close to his mouth. "Fury's two soldiers—"

"Didn't sink in right away, huh?" Steven asks, and Thor glances between him and Loki on the ground, trying to make sense of what precisely is going on. He had noticed Tony and Steven were away from the rest of them, locked away in a room with Nick Fury and Abigail Brand, but two soldiers…? "You never see somebody die before?" _Die_?

"I was a child of the country," Loki says, gritting his teeth, and he gags again. "I was hunting before I could read."

"Late reader, huh?" Tony asks, and Loki lets out a weak laugh. He gags again, but then swallows hard. "We need to get you a bowl?"

"I'm rather hoping it will pass," Loki says, so _stoic_ , and Thor thinks of the other Loki – his brother, now lost. As a child, he cried copiously over dead things, whether they were flowers or horses or figures in myth, but he hardened as they grew older. Loki was comfortable and confident on the battlefield, easily felling warrior after warrior without the barest hint of regret. Thor feels the pang of grief inside him, distant and yet striking a cold note within his chest. "You should— The man, Smith. Where is he?"

"He must have taken a different way out," Tony says, shaking his head. "Fury or Brand'll have sent men after him, don't worry about it. And the soldiers, Derrick and Hansen… They knew what they signed up for. There's risk involved, and they knew that." This time, Steven Rogers moves quickly, and when Loki's stoicism finally gives way, he vomits into a mop bucket from the corner of the room, a wet spatter sounding as it hits the little water left in the bottom.

Steven reaches out, his hand touching to Loki's shoulder, and Thor finds himself somewhat surprised – Steven has never professed any especial like for Loki, not appreciating his acerbic sense of humour, nor the playful arrogance he will engage in with Tony, but it seems that seeing Loki like this, vulnerable, he has changed his mind a little.

"I have to go liaison with Fury and Brand. Get it all out, Svensson. You'll feel better. It gets easier."

"For soldiers, perhaps," Loki mumbles, his voice echoing slightly in the chamber of the bucket, and Thor sees the comment hits the captain hard. Steven pauses a second, his lips parting, but he does not argue: his eyes merely become a little sadder, and he gives a single nod of his head before he leaves the room. "Have they told you, Thor? What happened?"

"No," Thor says quietly. "But you need not relate the tale for my sake, Son of Sven." Loki's hand touches Thor's own, his thin, clever fingers clutching at Thor's broad ones. Loki's hands look delicate from a distance, but they are scarred and dappled with past cuts and grazes; a patch of his hand and two of his fingers lack hair entirely as a result of the way they've been burned in some accident of engineering or other.

"They lacked even time to scream, to be aware of their fate," Loki says, urgently. His eyes are wide, the light filtering into their sea-green depths, and he seems like he may crumble into pieces at any moment. "One moment, they were alive: the next, they were dust. And it was— it was _my fault_. I ought have put down the tablet, raised my arms—"

"No, Loki," Tony breaks in, shaking his head. "Look, they stepped right into the field of that energy field, and you told them not to. They were pointing guns at you as you tried to fix a problem: I wouldn't have been very co-operative either. It wasn't your fault." Loki is staring into the distance, now, and Thor looks to Tony. Tony's mouth is twisted in a messy line, his expression betraying a sense of sadness, of grief… And perhaps of shared feeling.

"I will retrieve for you some water, Loki," Thor says quietly, and he pats Tony on the shoulder as he stands to leave the room.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

As Loki steps into his apartment that evening, he smiles to himself, reaching up and feeling the softness of his own lips beneath the leather of his gloves, feeling the ghost of electric sensation there. He is pleased, _of course_ , that his gambit in adopting a fainting spell and feigning some _ridiculous_ guilt for the idiot soldiers had been believed.

The taste of bile had lingered in his mouth for longer than was fair, and he had been grateful for the water Thor had brought to him; he was less grateful for the ensuing interrogation from members of both the SWORD and SHIELD teams, but he had been glad for the walk home in the pleasant cool of the New York night.

"Want a ride?" Stark had asked him, holding up the keys to some fast-paced automobile, and Loki had smiled at him, softly, _delicately_. He was playing a young man beset by death, after all, and upset at the thought of his own mortality! He could not possibly betray too much apparent strength.

"No," Loki had murmured, proffering his arm for the other man to take. "Although I shouldn't decline an escort."

Removing his coat and scarf, he hangs them each upon the neat hooks beside his door, then slides off his shoes and puts them upon the shoe rack beside the welcome mat. Midgardians have such _specialized_ furniture, with storage devices designed for all manner of specific fare, and Loki enjoys having everything in its place.

Tony had kissed him on the pavement outside, tangling his hand in Loki's hair and drawing him in close, and Loki had delighted in the power that accompanied leaving the other man, panting and flushed and some blocks away from the nearest taxi rank, upon his doorstep. He still feels the sensation of Tony Stark's beard against his own, still feels the soft vibration of Tony's laugh against his tongue, his groan and grasping hands as Loki had pushed him away.

"I like your flat," says a voice in the darkness of his living room, and Loki looks at the figure of Doctor John Smith, sprawled comfortably upon Loki's favourite armchair. He flicks on the light, and he watches the way Smith's eyes adjust to the sudden light, his pupils constricting as he blinks rapidly. "I actually took you for a minimalist, but this, this is very nice. Edwardian?"

"Georgian," Loki answers mildly, delicately removing his gloves and setting them in one of the compartments of a shelf beside his shoulder. The shelf holds various gloves and accoutrements – pocket squares, hair ribbons, watches. Accessories to his outfits, to be taken up as he leaves the house. "The Edwardian style is perhaps more comfortable, but… _Gaudy_." Smith smiles. "You said you had places to be."

"I do," Smith says, after a pause, but then he shrugs his shoulders. "But, ah… Well, Time's not really as urgent as it seems like." Loki frowns, tilting his head slightly to the side as he tries to puzzle through that _particular_ statement of nonsense. "That offer of a coffee still open?"

"Of course," Loki replies: with a polite nod of his head, he gestures for Smith to follow him, and this is how he finds himself in his modest kitchen with a hot drink between his cool palms, settled upon the counter on one side of the room with Smith settled beside the sink on the other side.

"Your kitchen's smaller than I expected. Not one for cooking?" Smith asks, and Loki shakes his head. Why is he entertaining this, he wonders? Why is he allowing this strange man into his _home_ , to potter about his private things? And yet Loki finds he minds no more than when Thor or Darcy or Pietro are here: Loki's apartment is his own, to be certain, but he cannot be his true self here, and there are no signs of his secrets here as there might be in his private laboratory.

"When I was younger, there was a distinct fear that I was like to poison anybody in my reach. Cuisine seemed pointless as a hobby if no one would sample my labours." It is strangely refreshing to be around Smith. Perhaps that is why Loki doesn't feel the need to attack him or cast him out of his home: Loki has for so long shared secrets only of his new life, his _human_ life. To speak so candidly on the life which truly bore him feels distinctly liberating. Smith takes a slow sip of his coffee, looking Loki in the eyes.

"Would you have? Poisoned people?" Loki considers the question. Certainly, later in life, he had cultivated an extensive knowledge of poisons, interested at their interaction, at those which could envenom a blade and others that worked best in wines or ports, at those which came as fine powders and others in the form of thick liquid, almost like syrup, or half-congealed blood. But as a child? Young, and interested in the servants as they cooked? Accused of poisoning merely because of his penchant for the wonder of seiðr?

"No, I don't think so. But one can never be sure of these things," Loki says softly. He breathes in the scent of his coffee, rich and robust, settling deep within his lungs and seeming to warm him from the inside out. Asgardian might have wondrous technologies, but coffee? It is an elixir the likes of which he had never tasted at home, so bitter and so subtle in its varying tastes! "Why are you here?"

"Thought it might be nice to have a chat," Smith says lightly. "You know, about the weather, current events, latest episode of Emmerdale… Stuff like that."

"What is your name?" Loki asks, cupping his mug comfortably between his hands and feeling its smoothness beneath his rough, well-worked palms. "Your true name, I mean: you cannot possibly expect me to believe your name is _John Smith_." Smith laughs, shaking his head.

"No, no, that's not it at all. It's the Doctor, actually. _Just_ the Doctor." He says it casually, as if it means nothing at all for him to offer such a name, so easily, so simply! And yet Loki feels his mouth run abruptly dry, feels the blood pound between his ears, and oh! Oh!

"The Doctor?" Loki repeats. For a moment, it is like the whole of the universe fades entirely away, and he is sat not on his kitchen counter, but in the vacuum of silent space, staring and yet unseeing; he hears the shatter of his mug upon the ground distantly, as if the sound itself is but a ghost.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki is barely a few centuries old, standing with his soles bare in the dust of a far-distant planet, staring up at a huge statue of a man bent half at the waist, smiling paternally down from his pedestal. A bowl of sweet incense burns before his feet, and the scent is cloying and sweet, like gelatine: something is proffered in his left hand, a package or a packet open.

 _"_ _Loki,"_ his mother says, and he turns his head toward her. Princelings do not tarry, he supposes she might say, were he Thor, but instead she offers him a small smile and puts out her hand.

" _Who is he?_ "

" _A god of this planet. I know him not."_ And he and his mother walk through the marketplace, searching for the beautiful wools and yarns with which his mother wants to weave.

" _Who is he?_ " Loki asks later on, of a man in deep blue robes, dyed with the rare flowers that only grow upon the river's embankment when the moon is at its height. This man is a priest, and Loki knows him by the curls upon his head, and the paternity of his smile.

" _The Doctor,"_ the priest had said, and had told him nothing more.

Loki finishes his story with a flourish of seiðr that dances on the air like glittering sand caught in a storm, and he smiles, offering a polite bow at the thunderous applause he receives from the others in the encampment. It is the first time he has dared to display his magic so openly, so far from the protections of Asgard: here he is, isolated and anonymous, a hundred stars away from his homeland, and he has never felt so gloriously free. His five hundredth birthday has been his best yet.

"That was beautiful," says an elderly woman, a sage with hair of deepest, shining silver. "I have a tale to tell myself, traveller, but I fear I cannot paint such wonders as you."

"You shall paint them with your voice alone, dear lady," Loki says, bowing his head before her, offering her the respect she is owed as the elder of the group, and he sees her wide smile.

"Very well," she says, and she slowly pulls herself to stand, her shawl settled loosely around her shoulder as she addresses the group. Loki settles himself cross-legged on the ground, and a young man pats his shoulder encouragingly, offering more silent thanks for his story. The camp is on the curve of a river, and is sweetly cool with the passing water that drifts by in silver streams: Loki watches her, the elder woman, with care and focus. "My name is Peladi, and when I was but a newly-wed, expecting my firstborn, the rains came to the Equis Plains. But these were not the rains we expected and welcomed each summer's end, no: these rains pounded and pounded upon the dusty ground, until the sand became slurry under our feet, and we couldn't lay down to sleep because our bedrolls were washed away."

Loki shifts in his seat, bringing his knees up before him and leaning his elbows on them, watching Peladi speak. Her old eyes are alight with energy, her wizened lips quirked into a smile even as she speaks of a tragedy in her life time.

"We saw lights in the sky – a disc of sorts. And then came a man in clothes of technicolour, and he carried above him a device made of panels in all the colours of the rainbow, and like a boat in reverse, it protected him from the rain as it fell. He was up to his knees in the filthy water, and he said, "I say! We should see about this! How are you, madam?" And I said, well, my husband and wives are readying for us to leave – we cannot stay here on the plains.

"But you're pregnant," he said to me. "Are you fit for travel?"

"I must, sir," I said. He said he would see what he could do, and turned away from me, but before he went, I asked him his name. And he said he couldn't tell me that, but he would give me something to call him: _the Doctor_."

Loki's heart skips a beat. The words ring in his ears, that mystery from his childhood, the distant god: _the Doctor_.

"And I saw him! He went up to that disc in the sky by a ladder, and he spoke to those within – it wasn't merely an apparition, a ghost, but a sort of _sky-ship_ , and within were hundreds of people. The bow of their ship had interacted with our clouds in some way, stopping the rains from stopping as they ought, and they came down to help us rebuild what had been washed away. Oh, these men from the skies… You ought have known them, seen them!" Loki remains silent, knowing himself to be the only alien upon this world, but Peladi is beaming as she pulls her shawls more tightly around herself, looking dreamily into the ether. "They had hair on every inch of their bodies, long and trailing, and they spoke low and huskily with voices like distant waves."

"And the Doctor?" Loki asks. "What of him?" Peladi looks down at him, and her eyes are so brightly yellow, amber in the dying light of the evening.

"I saw him once more, roaming in the city at Porth's Point some months later, after my babe had been born. I saw his hair shine in the light, and the panels upon his strange device: I ran, calling his name, but he heard me not… He was lost to me." Loki nods his head, slowly, and files this story away. "But the people! Oh, these men, like desert wolves…"

In the vacuum of space, there is no sound, no air, and no gravity.

Loki creates his own.

He walks in space as if he is walking on a flat expanse of land, thinking his loneliest thoughts and smiling vaguely to himself. He enjoys these journeys from one planet to the next – for the majority of his journey, he will transform himself sometime, use his seiðr to speed himself the huge distances, but for some minority, he will enjoy the mundanity of the walk on a fathomless expanse.

The impossibility of it, the normality of it, delights him to his chaotic core.

The universe is a wide place, and it isn't until he is eight or nine centuries long that he happens to pass a ship as he walks. The ship must find his lifesigns, for they come very close to him, even tractor him aboard (the _impertinence!)_ , and he stands in their vacuum lock, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrows raised.

"My name is Jenny," she says. She's a blonde girl, petite and wide-eyed, with muscle heavy on her form. Loki looks at her, his head tilted to the side. "You were… You were _walking_. Out there, in space."

"And you interrupted me," Loki says, his tone deliberate.

"Oh," she says. "That was rude, wasn't it?"

"Mmm," Loki agrees, with a slow inclination of his head. "Although I might forgive your curiosity."

"I'll let you go, sorry—" she seems to hesitate, and then she says, "But before you go… Look, I'm looking for my father." Loki looks down at her, his lips pressed together: despite himself, he thinks of the foal Sleipnir, borne of Loki by the stallion Svaðilfari. Never could he nurse that cursed child, nor even hold him to his breast – Odin took the foal from him, and he lives alongside the mares of the palace stables, where Loki is no longer permitted to tread. The wound is still barely healed, months-old and aching as he walks – and perhaps that _is_ why he walks farther than he really needs to.

"Who is your father? If I know him, I shall tell you what I know."

"His name is— Look, this sounds stupid, but his name is the Doctor." Loki feels the blood drain from his face, and he stares her in the face, this girl.

"Your _father_?" he repeats, and he clenches his hands together. Joy bursts across her cheeks, her bright smile, her eyes – so full of light – and he shakes his head slightly, spreading out his hands. "I— I know him not, child, I am sorry. But I will tell you what little I _do_ know. Let me give you co-ordinates, and you will share with me what you know of him."

Jenny smiles, her teeth white and shining. "Alright," she says, putting out her hand to shake. "It's a deal."

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki stares down at his coffee cup, shattered on the ground. His mouth is still dry, his blood still pounding, his head slightly light, and he looks slowly to the Doctor's face. The Doctor has the smile of a man who has long-since pretended not to _care_ for his fame, and has long-since failed.

"Have you heard of me?" the Doctor asks, showing his white smile: yes, Loki sees the teeth of young Jenny in this man, sees her vibrance, her beauty… _Time Lord_. But Loki will not smile as the Doctor does, will not show amusement, or charm – the Doctor had been an absent thought for him, a research project, a distraction. The idea of _meeting_ him,

"The Time Lord with his blue box. Yes, I have heard of you – bits and pieces of you, here and there. I've heard six tales of your mercy, your heart," Loki says quietly. The Doctor's eyes eyebrows raise slightly, and his smile fades a little – he leans back, tilting his chin up a little and displaying apparent uncertainty.

"All on Earth?" he tries to say it casually, but it sends ideas reeling in Loki's head – the idea that he might have searched and searched, read and read, for any scant mention of this man and that he should have been on _Midgard_ all this time…

"On _Earth_?" Loki repeats, and he stares at the other man, trying to take this in. He had been so frustrated, finding so little of the Doctor after he had parted ways with his daughter, but this… Curious. _Curious_. "No," he admits. "Elsewhere… Here and there. You control time, do you not? I control something better."

"Oh?" the Doctor says, and he takes a sip from his drink, seeming amused. He thinks of Loki as a child before him, perhaps: he forgets he may not be the most powerful man in the room. A dangerous thing to forget, that, but Loki was guilty of much the same sin when he was a younger man. "And what's that?"

"The beating heart of every man I meet," Loki whispers. The Doctor's lips part. Loki laughs, pushing seiðr into the air, and he reconstitutes the coffee and the broken mug together, drawing them back up between his palms. The coffee is not drinkable now, of course, marred as it shall be with the dust upon the floor, so he pulls himself down from the counter and pours the coffee away. "Magic, as I'd call it. I imagine you'd call it something else."

"Magic doesn't exist," the Doctor says, tutting his tongue. "It's… It's just a different sort of science."

"If you like," Loki says mildly. "But I don't know many men who can make science, as I can, with their bare hands." The Doctor has nothing to say to that, and merely creates a rather adorable furrow between his dark brows, tapping his long fingers against the mug. The mug declares itself the property of **THE OFFICE BITCH** – a gift from Darcy that Christmas past. The Doctor seems not to notice. "And what of gods?"

"I don't believe in gods," the Doctor says, and Loki wonders what it must feel like, to be a god yourself, and believe not in your own power. Loki himself is worshiped on at least twenty planets, that he knows of, and he should never dismiss the power this gives him – ephemeral, the power may be, but nonetheless, it spurs him on. "Loki Svensson… What's your real name?"

"I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours," Loki says, and the Doctor lets out a short laugh.

"I can feel your… Impact," the Doctor says, waving his right hand in the air and wiggling his fingers as he does so. "On the timelines, I mean. How old are you?"

"Closer to three millennia than two," Loki says, slowly. "But I fear, as old as I am, I lose track of the years as they pass." Two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four: Loki knows precisely how old he is, and tracks his age as he might anything else. To know one's exact age is considered rather precocious upon Asgard, and he is so used to denying knowledge of it that he doesn't realize how silly, how unnecessary the lie is until it has already fled his lips. "And yourself? I see the age in your eyes, like the light of a distant star."

"Nine hundred and four," the Doctor answers. _Nine hundred! So young!_ And yet… But Loki was walking the stars long before this man could have been born. How— Ah. The time travel. How silly of him to forget so vital a thought. "You travel in space?" the Doctor asks as Loki finally rinses out his mug, and Loki chuckles quietly, wryly. The Doctor seems confused, and Loki sighs.

"Not anymore. I cannot risk leaving this planet… I'd be noticed."

"What if you came with me?" Loki pauses, staring into his sink. He gives the Doctor a sideways glance. He seems entirely serious, doing his best to be casual about the offer, but it settles in Loki's chest with the immensity of a new star, hot and heavy.

"You don't know who I am," Loki says. Oh, but why should it _matter_? Shouldn't he grasp at this opportunity while he can, to travel with a legend?

"Who are you?" Loki opens his mouth. He feels his own hesitation, curses himself for it, and wishes times were simpler, wishes that he was centuries younger, wishes that he still had his wife upon his arm and his children at his side, wishes the wishes he has long-since wished to exhaustion.

"Guess," he says. And oh, how the Doctor smiles – oh, how he _smiles_.

"Seems unfair to make me guess," he says, idly. "Unless I've got multiple tries, I mean… Why don't you come with me?"

"Just until you guess?"

"Just until I guess," the Doctor confirms, and he puts out his hand to shake. Loki thinks of the Doctor's daughter, all those centuries ago, and he grasps the Doctor's hand, shakes it.

" _Deal_ ," he says, and this is the moment – he pinpoints it centuries later, when he lies alone in a jail cell and stares at himself in opaque glass – where he is irrevocably, irreversibly, tied to the Doctor and thus, to the fates, forevermore.


	7. Feeding Monsters

"You're back late," Steve says, and Tony turns his head, looking at the other man. When this had been Stark Tower, Tony had often slept on the cot downstairs in his lab, but these days, with Avengers Tower a bed and board for Avengers and allies who just want to drop in, he has his own room up on one of the higher floors, with no windows on any sides – just sweet, blissful darkness where he can sleep for as long as he needs.

When Steve Rogers isn't in the way, of course.

"S'not so late," Tony says, shrugging his shoulders lightly. "It's only…" He glances at his watch, feels his eyebrows raise and his tired eyes widen a little, despite their dryness. "Oh, shit."

"Good morning," Steve says. He leans on the counter-island that separates the main shared living area from the walkway that leads to the elevators and stairwells to the bedrooms, and Tony sees now that Steve hasn't been waiting up for him to come home: Steve has his morning coffee in his hands, and has probably been for his morning run around Central Park already. "Six AM, huh. You just outta Svensson's bed?"

"You know, I preferred you when I didn't know how dirty your mind was," Tony says, putting his hands in his pockets, and Steve scoffs. "Rogers, I used to think the 40s were _pure_!"

"We brawled, we had sex, and we drank like all Hell," Steve retorts: he doesn't seem amused by Tony's attempts to joke, and Tony sighs, rolling his shoulders and feeling their ache. After leaving Loki's apartment, he'd settled on a park bench and just _thought_ for a little while – although given that the sun is gonna rise soon, maybe he'd been there for longer than he'd initially thought. "Why didn't you just stay there?"

"I wasn't in his bed," Tony mutters, reaching up and pressing the heel into his left eye, rubbing at it and trying to soothe away the headache he can feel starting in the back of his head. "What's it to you anyway, Rogers?"

"Think maybe I misjudged Svensson," Steve says, his lips loosely pressed together. What is he thinking about, Tony wonders? His eyes have a faraway look to them – what, he thinking about Bucky? Maybe. Tony wouldn't be the first to wonder what exactly their relationship had been like before the war, before all that Winter Soldier shit, except Bucky talks more to Nat than Steve, and spends a great deal of time holed up in his own quarters, doing his own shit. Sam, then? Sam Wilson is easily the closest friend Steve Rogers has, except perhaps Nat, but Tony doesn't pretend to understand exactly how Cap makes his decisions or forms his relationships.

"I never heard you say a bad word about him," Tony says, slowly. And it's true, too: Steve isn't an unopinionated guy, but whenever word of Loki or one of his technologies came up, he'd shrug his shoulders and not say anything at all, one way or the other. "You been harbouring some _dark_ thoughts?" He knows the way he asks the question seems ridiculous, but he's too tired to find a better way to phrase it, and Steve exhales slowly through his nose.

"Not exactly. Guess I just thought he was…" Steve seems to consider it, his eyes alive with the morning fire Tony _totally_ isn't jealous of, and he finally says, "Guess I thought he shouldn't be here. He's a civilian, and he doesn't make weapons or defence systems – I kinda thought it was irresponsible of you and Maximoff to get so friendly with him, even if he wasn't regularly visiting the tower or anything."

"You don't like Maximoff no matter what he's doing," Tony points out, maybe a little defensively – he and Pietro will work sometimes in the same lab, Tony running tests and feeling the soft breeze as Pietro flits from one part of the lab to another, changing up the make-up of his suit or making some little device or other. Even with that, he had no idea Pietro was an actual _engineer_ : he'd just figured the guy was smart and good with mathematics.

"You wouldn't understand," Steve says, and Tony swallows the bitter taste the reply leaves in his mouth. "Anyway, for Svensson… I thought he couldn't handle it."

"Today didn't prove he couldn't?" Tony's tone is sardonic, and ruefully, Steve cracks a smile.

"He broke down _afterwards_ ," Steve points out quietly. "Down in the basement, he kept his head. He coulda died, and he focused on keeping everyone safe. Raised my estimations, I guess. Raised yours too, seems like."

"This has been brewing for a while," Tony says.

"Didn't take you for a guy into other guys," Steve says, and he says it as if it reveals something big about Tony's character, as if it's somehow revealing. Tony frowns, glancing at the other man, but Steve's soft smile is friendly, and warm. He can hear the whir of the elevator down the corridor – the others in the tower are starting to wake up now, and Luke Cage is running a Mario Kart tournament later this afternoon. Tony had been set on snatching the prize out of Parker's hands, too… Maybe another day, when he isn't so exhausted he's asleep on his feet. "See you later, Tony."

"See ya, Cap," Tony says, and he heads down the hall, calling for the elevator. And who should be inside but Thor fuckin' Odinson, in a bathrobe with damp hair and a cheerful expression? God, Tony just can't get a _break._

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Thor reclines in the pool, floating on his back, his arms and legs outstretched as that of the starfish, his gaze upon the tiled ceiling of the gym. He has found the pool at Avengers Tower is at its quietest in the dead of night, where barely anyone except Thor – who sleeps for more hours than the Midgardians, but takes a two hour break between some sleep and the next – will want to make use of it. Two or three times, another of the light-sleepers have joined him – Thor has challenged Luke Cage to lengths of the pool, and has retold stories of great battles to Bucky Barnes as he rests on the edge, up only to his ankles in the water – but for the most part he retains the silent waters to himself, and to his private musings.

It has been a long time since he has seen a young man so distressed by death as he had seen Loki today, so obviously sick to his stomach, and so overwrought… It is wrong, perhaps, that men like Loki, simple men with a passion for creation, should be drawn into the horrors of death and destruction, but no man can escape such things in the end.

"How old is Loki Svensson?" Thor had asked Natasha Romanov that night, when Thor had seen Loki leave to return home, with Tony offering him the use of his vehicle.

"Twenty-seven," Natasha had said, and looked at him with her deep, dark eyes, seeming perplexed. If Loki Svensson reminds him of Loki, Natasha reminds Thor a little of his niece, who inhabits the underworld and rules its entirety. Would it flatter her, Thor wonders, to be compared to Hel? Perhaps not. It matters little: Thor wouldn't consider it so simple a statement as to be a compliment. "Didn't you celebrate his birthday with him?"

"Is that old? For a Midgardian?" Thor had asked, and understanding had come to Natasha's face, her lips parting slightly.

"No, he's still young. Middle age is around forty, fifty. Old age comes at around seventy or eighty these days. Humans used to have a lifespan that stretched to seventy, eighty, maybe ninety – these days, though, people are living longer. Maybe by the time he's older, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty." She had reached out to him, _reached out_ , pressed her cool palm to the breadth of Thor's arm, offered a small smile. Natasha, Thor _knows_ , is a spy with a necessarily cold heart, and it had filled him with warmth that she would try to comfort him. "You'll have him a while yet, Thor. Don't worry about it."

Thor shifts in the water, closing his eyes and tilting his head back slightly, feeling the cool water sink into his hair, weighting it down and darkening it in the water. The scent of chlorine is thick in his nostrils, overpowering and uncomfortably strong, but when he had asked after the nearest natural spring, the response he'd received had been perplexed and uncertain. Midgard has need of these chlorinated pools, and Thor must simply make do, just as he must wear these strange "swimming trunks", as opposed to bathing in the nude, as he has long-been accustomed.

What is to be done about Loki?

Thor will telephone him this week, he thinks, and offer to meet somewhere with him; perhaps he might teach him to fight. Loki studies some Midgardian martial art or other, and Thor has watched him perform meditative exercises as part of this craft, but he doubts Loki knows how to fight properly.

Thor's brother had been reluctant to fight Thor, at first. When finally the palace guards began to offer each of them tutelage in melee, Thor had thrown himself into the new craft with aplomb, but Loki had been demure and uncertain, seeming so small at the side of the dirt arena in which Thor trained. Mother had taken Loki aside, Thor recalls, training him to fight as she had learned herself – Thor recalls he'd had a tantrum over it, on a night when the skies were stormy and Loki had finally faced him in the arena, and _won_.

Father had taken over Thor's tutelage from there… Had Father offered Loki help too? Surely, he wouldn't merely have offered it to Thor himself? _Or_ , Thor notes to himself, _there is a chance he offered, and Loki refused_.

It serves him not to think of such things, and yet Thor finds his mind wandering to his lost brother multiple times a day. He had received a missive from Father and Mother that very morning – there had yet to be a sign of Loki in any nearby realm, and he could have fallen into the expanse of space itself, landing on some forgotten planet or cold moon.

Thor sighs, leaning forwards and swimming to the edge of the pool, pulling himself onto the edge and padding quietly into the changing room. Towelling himself off, he puts on his bathrobe (a gift from Tony Stark, emblazoned with a **T** in gold upon its breast) and a pair of slippers, stepping into the elevator and leaning against the wall as he rises toward the upper floors, where the bedrooms are to be found.

He covers a yawn behind his palm as the doors open a few floors beneath Thor's own, and he looks at the exhausted figure of Tony Stark. There are dark circles beneath his eyes, and his lips are slightly bruised: evidently, he has taken his time in "escorting" Loki home.

"Have you only just returned?" Thor asks, glancing at the time on the lift's blue-glowing screen: _6:13AM._

"You up already?" Tony asks, in a tone of vague complaint as he smashes the button for his own floor, and Thor smiles.

"I am returning to my bed now," he says quietly. "I shall take another four hours _at least_ before I rise for the morning."

"You got the right idea," Tony says. His fingers are tapping nervously against his leg, and he is staring at Thor as if Thor poses some sort of threat: the motion is somewhat perplexing, and Thor allows his puzzlement to show upon his face.

"Have I worried you, Man of Iron?"

"Just… You know. I walked Loki home."

"Indeed. Most chivalrous of you," Thor says, nodding his head. Tony blinks at him. What, he expects _further_ praise? But what more is to be said?

"You get the connotations of that, right? Me being out for like, six hours, after walking him home… Returning early in the morning?" Thor narrows his eyes slightly, twisting his lips and rubbing his palm over the short, bristly hairs of his beard. "You're not… I don't know, pissed? Protective?" Understanding comes like moonlight from behind a dark cloud, and Thor feels himself relax.

"No, Tony," Thor says, reaching out and gently patting the younger man's shoulder. "Loki is my good friend, and he makes his choices as he pleases. He is not my child, nor my dependant. On Asgard, we do not interfere in the relationships of others – perhaps offer counsel, when it is desired, but that is all."

"Guess I was worried you were going to threaten to beat me up if I hurt him," Tony says lightly. Thor chuckles.

"Loki is not of violent makings," Thor says. The elevator doors open, and he steps partially out of the elevator, leaning against the door frame to prevent them from closing before he finishes his sentence. "If you hurt him, Man of Iron, I have no doubt his revenge would be more cunning than that."

Tony laughs.

"Guess it's good I'm not planning to hurt him," he says softly. "Night, Thor."

"Good night, Tony," Thor says, with a polite bow of his head, and he steps down the corridor toward his own quarters.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

"My companions don't usually pack a bag," the Doctor says mildly. He sits cross-legged on the leather ottoman at the foot of Loki's double bed, which is sheeted in luxurious Egyptian cotton, watching Loki as he packs a small, vintage suitcase. The case is open beside the Doctor, and he eyes everything Loki puts inside: so far, some changes of underwear, a few pairs of rather tight jeans, two or three buttoned shirts. There is nothing in the room that speaks to Loki's apparent inhumanity: the Doctor had half-suspected him to release some sort of secret panel or complex technological device, but his bedroom is as mundane as any other room the Doctor's ever seen.

" _Companions_?" Loki repeats, and he arches a blond eyebrow, letting out an almost-offensively derisive sound. He doesn't seem at all uncomfortable with having the Doctor in his room, so the Doctor can only presume that there are no potential clues or curiosities around him – it doesn't mean he isn't going to look. "You wound my ego, Doctor, to tell me I am not the first."

"Nine stories, you said," the Doctor says, doing his best not to let the wheedle into his tone. He is _curious_ , and he can hardly help it – he rarely revisits planets where he made an especial difference, and while he knows that he's made into legend on some planets or by some sects, he knows it is best not to dwell on it. But to have somebody right in front of him, treating _him_ like a legend? That's impossible to resist. "Surely there were people with the Doctor in those stories?"

"In some of them," Loki says. He is wrapping twelve wax candles in brown paper and tying the parcel with twine. The candles smell like juniper and mistletoe, and the Doctor feels his nostrils flare as he inhales.

"Do you like the smell of mistletoe?" the Doctor asks mildly, thinking of his and Rose's encounter with the monks at Torchwood House a few weeks back. Loki chuckles, seeming fond for a moment, and then he gives an inclination of his head.

"In the Norse myth," Loki says lightly, taking up a small, wooden box and opening it up, "the God Baldr could not be harmed by anything at all. His mother, the goddess Frigga, had asked of every living thing an oath that it should _never_ harm him: except the mistletoe. Frigga looked upon the mistletoe, and thought it so small and so insignificant that it could never harm him. So Loki crafted a spear of mistletoe, and passed it unto another, who pieced Baldr through and through."

"That's horrible," the Doctor says, but he doesn't frown. Loki seems deeply amused by the story, as if he looks on it fondly, and the Doctor is as curious about Loki as he is about his own tales.

"The myths are rather brutal," Loki admits, chuckling. "I rather liked the ambiguity of the character, thus why I took up the name. I didn't realize at the time, of course, that these myths had true progenitors." The Doctor watches as he picks up a few watches and silver chains, placing them carefully in the box, alongside a few sets of cufflinks, some earrings. The Doctor hasn't known a great many men so comfortable with jewellery.

"The Asgardians, you mean?" the Doctor asks, and he nods his head. "Yeah. Lots of people don't realize it when they first come to Earth, but it has a long history of alien inhabitants. Have you ever been to Asgard? I read an interview – you said you were pretty close with Thor."

"Been? No, goodness," Loki says, shaking his head. He seems pensive for a moment, clasping the box closed and placing it into the suitcase with the rest. There's a thoughtful conflict on his face as he finally shrugs his shoulders and gives an answer. "I rather like Thor, but I don't know… He believes I grew up near-worshiping stories of him. I don't know that I could walk the streets of his cities feigning astonishment and delight at every little thing, even _were_ he to invite me. Have you been?"

"No," the Doctor says. He places his chin on his palm, considering the question as Loki opens a wardrobe and reaches in, taking out a few journals and a light jacket, placing both into the base of the suitcase. The journals seem hand-written, and he feels his two hearts _sing_ with curiosity, so he forces himself to turn his head, looking at the wallpaper Loki has up in his bedroom. "Asgard is actually pretty strict about those who enter and exit – I've heard of Time Lords trying and getting caught by Heimdall. That was… That was years ago, when I was a child. He really _can_ see everything in Asgard, you know." The Doctor trails off, feeling himself slightly stiff as his gaze traces the tree pattern on the walls.

"And you don't believe in magic," Loki scoffs, taking a tie and neatly tying up his hair. He seems to know not to ask about "Ought I change?" He gestures to the suit he's wearing, and the Doctor blinks.

"Why would you do that?"

"You don't think this is perhaps too formal for a casual romp on a distant planet?" The Doctor opens his mouth, then purses his lips together as he looks down at his own suit. Seems perfectly serviceable to _him._

"It doesn't really seem important," he says, finally. Loki is staring at him, _incredulously_ , as if he's somehow insulted by what the Doctor has said, and he arches his eyebrows, bemused. " _What_?"

"How many times, pray, have you been chased from a settlement by a horde of angry villagers?" Loki asks, archly.

"I'm not going to answer that," the Doctor says, rather hurriedly, and before Loki can ask anything else, he hops up onto his feet, clapping his hands together. "Got your stuff together?"

"Mmm," Loki hums. "I'd appreciate time to fix my Isaz, but I have all the components I need in a bag in the living room, so I'll just pop those into the case." Helpfully, the Doctor picks up the case by its flat side, leaving it open where it rests on his forearms as he follows Loki out of the bedroom.

"Won't you need your laboratory?" the Doctor asks as Loki picks up a leatherette satchel, taking a quick glance inside before placing it into the case and clasping it shut. Loki looks about as baffled as the Doctor must have looked when Loki questioned his suit.

"No," he says eventually. "How do you think I _built_ a laboratory, if I required my laboratory to build everything?" The Doctor suspects this is a false equivalence, but he thinks better of pointing it out, and he watches as Loki pulls on a light coat and puts a silvery-blue scarf around his neck, hanging open over his coat labels.

The Doctor hands him the suitcase. "You ready?"

"I'm ready," Loki assents, with a neat nod of his head. The Doctor grins, and leads the way out of the apartment building.

Ten minutes later, Loki has his back pressed against the alley wall, one hand up before him, palm out and radiating electric heat, his eyes wild with a mix of fear and fury. The rain is falling in fat, leisurely drops, and when they touch the flesh of his outstretched hand they sizzle and evaporate.

"What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?" he hisses, and the Doctor stands with his own hands up in a gesture to calm down, his shoulders squared. This is… _Unexpected_ , to say the least.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

It is some minutes before seven AM: more specifically, it is twenty milliseconds past thirty one seconds past forty nine minutes past six. Pietro stands in the corridor outside Nick Fury's office, watching the rain as it falls onto the city below. For Pietro, time moves immeasurably slowly, so his watch reads his seconds like minutes and his minutes like hours: the rain comes down in slow motion, and it is beautiful.

Pietro has always loved the rain.

"Mr Maximoff," says a voice behind him, distorted and slow, but Pietro has been used to the strangeness of other voices since he was nine years old and his mutation manifested all at once, so he makes no comment. Turning, he looks at Nick Fury, at the black patch over his eye and his broad, strapping shoulders, at the slight shine on the top of his bald head from the overly bright lights in the SHIELD offices. "Thanks for the prompt report. You don't mind answering me a few questions?"

Pietro stands for a long time, absolutely still, his lips loosely pressed together, his gaze on Fury's face. Pietro has taken time to learn the rhythms of other people's speech, of the ways he must focus to naturally slip in the pauses and inflections that come to others so very naturally. Pietro learned to meditate at a very young age, to be comfortable in the stillness – it is perhaps ironic he seems so impatient to others.

"If you have questions, I should recommend you ask them," Pietro says, cleanly, and Fury's head tips forward in a silent nod. Pietro slips past Fury, settling in the chair across from the younger man's desk. Fury follows him slowly into the room, oh-so-slowly, but doesn't take his own seat: kicking the door shut behind him, he leans against his windowsill, his shoulders against the rain-soaked glass of the window.

Pietro remembers the way it was during the Cold War, when no one would dare stand against a window and not at least be aware of what was going on outside it, but those days are long behind them now – every window in SHIELD's office block is bulletproof, much like the glass in Avengers Tower, and indeed, in the apartment block Pietro built and lives in. Fury was an agent of the CIA during the Cold War – and Pietro had his own allegiances. A thousand memories replay in his head, a thousand vague wonderings about Fury, about New York, about the way the war went.

Many of the Avengers dislike Fury, in some way or another – Pietro knows Loki himself keeps his distance from the man outside of doing his background checks and filing his paperwork for Kuldeheim, but Pietro understands Fury. A career of espionage leads easily to paranoia, and Fury isn't the only man to assume the worst of those around him.

"How long have you known Loki Svensson?" Fury asks. "Your statement on the events last night details how you started asking him for a donation, then taking his offered help with set-up, letting him publicly endorse the Magda Corporation—"

"Korporacja," Pietro corrects cleanly. Fury stares at him.

"How long have you known him?" Fury repeats.

"I met him the night Thor joined the Avengers. He was nervous about meeting his childhood hero, and we spoke, briefly. A week or so later, he sent me a thank you card – in perfect Polish, no less – and a hamper of kosher meats and pastries. I appreciated the gesture, and our friendship began in earnest from there."

"He Jewish?" Fury asks, frowning. It is not Pietro's turn to stare silently for some moments, his head tilting slightly to the side.

"No," he says, slowly. "But this is New York, Colonel Fury. It isn't difficult to find a kosher delicatessen. To my awareness, he's an atheist."

"You know if he has any political affiliations?" Fury asks, the question well-practised and almost neutral in its intonation: Fury is a natural interrogator. Pietro so dislikes to be interrogated. "Is he a member of any political parties, mentioned sympathy for any causes, stuff like that?"

"Well, he's not a communist," Pietro says. He lets out a short bark of laughter at his own joke: Fury remains stony. A true American, this one. What a waste. "He donates to various school programs and charities. He donates to the Xavier School, and to various school programs for genetically gifted students. There is a playschool on the city limits for mutant children – I believe he's on their Board of Governors."

"What about your father?"

"He lives very frugally. Presumably he donates his money somewhere, when not building fortresses and the like, but I—"

"I _mean_ ," Fury bites out, wielding his impatience like a weapon, "How does _Svensson_ feel about your father?" Pietro's lip twitches, and he feels amusement at having drawn a reaction out of Fury. He thinks of quiet dinners or drinks they've had together. Pietro had worried initially that Svensson was mounting some sort of seduction, but it had become quickly obvious that wasn't the case: they would merely spend time together, having conversations, discussing engineering or mathematical concepts Pietro can't speak about to others. Pietro's father has come up in conversation, but never has Loki asked him a question about the Mutant Brotherhood, or even about what Magneto himself is like.

"He's sympathetic," Pietro answers. "But not especially so."

"He likes mutants, right?" Fury asks, his eyebrows raising slightly. His hands are loosely clasped across his thighs, his shoulders touching the glass now. He's blocking out the sight of the rain.

"I see," Pietro says mildly. "You think Loki Svensson is a mutant sympathizer." That's rather funny. An interesting thought, to be certain: there is no doubt that Loki finds mutants interesting, and enjoys socializing with different types of people, but Pietro would hardly consider him a fanboy. The man simply has a lot of money to throw around, and so he does.

"You don't?" Fury asks. Pietro resists the sudden desire to scoff in derision.

"I don't think he sees mutants as any different to anyone else," Pietro murmurs, allowing his thumb to play over the glass-front of his custom watch, playing over the links that make up its bracelet.

"The Xavier School For Gifted Children," Fury says, reciting from a list in his head, "The Thompson Group. Musical Mutants. Fenton's Soccer and Basketball Club. Mint Playscheme. The West Star Paediatrics Group. Mutants With Bite Dentistry… These are all organisations Loki Svensson donates to. You saying he isn't extraordinarily into mutants?"

"I would argue that, yes," Pietro says quietly. "All of those organisations aren't merely focused around mutants, Colonel Fury: they are focused around mutant children. He also donates to various programs for inner-city school children, sponsoring them to visit museums, go on field trips, take out scholarships and bursaries, et cetera. He loves children, mutant or not."

There's an expression on Fury's face that Pietro is not entirely unfamiliar with. He sees it sometimes when he touches his daughter's cheek in public, or when he kisses her face after some time apart, and strangers visibly take offence. He sees it when he smiles at children in the street, or babies in the park, and their parents block Pietro's vision, or shoot him stares. It isn't necessarily because he's visibly a mutant, Pietro knows: he barely looks like he's into his forties, and he doesn't seem like a parent himself.

"He's into kids?"

"You're applying connotations where they aren't required," Pietro says lowly. "No children of your own, I suppose?"

"That ain't your business." Of course, Pietro knows the other man doesn't have children. How could one _not_ know? Fury's single eye is intent on Pietro, and he asks, "And Svensson? He got kids?"

Pietro meets Fury's gaze. The question flares a curiosity in him, a curiosity Pietro has found since the two of them have formed their friendship, if friendship it is. He recalls Loki visiting him home, quietly commenting on a photograph of Luna and Crystal Pietro had hanging upon the wall.

 _"She's beautiful, your daughter. Such lovely hair, and her eyes… They've the same energy your eyes have. So full of life."_ Pietro remembers well, in that moment, the way Loki's face had seemed to gain so many lines and wrinkles, how momentarily _ancient_ he had looked. He could have believed the man was thousands of years old, not twenty something.

 _"Do you have children of your own?"_ There had been a long pause as Loki had looked slowly from the photograph to Pietro himself. The ancientness about him, the old energy, had drained away, but had left a palpable melancholy. Pietro had never seen a young man look so very sad.

" _No_ ," he had said, and that had been the end of that.

"No," he says. "Not as far as I am aware. Is that everything, Colonel Fury?"

"One more question," Fury says. Pietro raises his silver eyebrows, leaning back slightly in his seat, and then he slowly puts out his hand, his palm facing the ceiling.

"Please," he says invitingly.

"Can you say, with _absolute_ certainty, that Loki Svensson isn't a mutant?" Pietro laughs. It must sound distorted and malformed to Fury's ears, because the idea so surprises Pietro that he forgets to slow the sound down.

"That is _preposterous_ ," he says, pulling himself from the seat before Fury's desk. "You grow too paranoid in your old age, Colonel. You are seeing shadows where none fall."

"That's real poetic, Maximoff," Fury mutters. He stays on the window sill, crossing his arms slowly over his chest, and Pietro feels his gaze on his back as he slips from the room. As he leaves the SHIELD building, making his way out of New York and beginning the jog to his own offices in Chicago, he thinks about the question.

Loki Svensson, a mutant. Possible, Pietro supposes. But why hide it? To protect his privacy? To be fair, Loki doesn't reveal many personal details at all to the press, about anything at all. For a tech giant, he barely even uses social media for stuff to do with _him_. Sure, he tweets his support for events and wishes people happy birthday, takes the occasional selfie, but that's it.

Pietro supposes he _could_ be a mutant… But it's not really his place to wonder.

✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯ **MY STARS FOR AN EMPIRE** ✯ ⇜ ⇝ ✯

Loki has never travelled with a suitcase before. He's carried a pack – saddlebags, a knapsack, a satchel, once or twice even the traditional bundle upon a stick – but never one of these suitcases. He might have tried one of the modern ones, with the little wheels and the fabric casing, but he rather likes the aesthetic of the hard leather cases… And so _petite_.

He doesn't really need to carry possessions with him – with seiðr to hand, he can conjure whatever possession he requires from the very ether around him. Even heavy metals can be managed if the situation calls for it.

But he rather likes the image he must cast: a young man in a suit and a light coat, with a vintage case hanging from his left hand, and moreover, the _weight_ of it is rather nice. The rain starts just as they exit the building, and Loki breathes in as he feels the first drops settle cool upon his skin, soaking into his tightly-tied bun of messy hair.

"I'm about ten minutes away," the Doctor says lightly. He walks confidently in the cool breeze of the morning, his hands in his pockets and his chin high: the sky is painted in peaches and deepening reds as the sun rises further above the skyline, and Loki smiles to himself as he falls into step beside the Doctor, who has a loping gait.

"Is it really a box?" Loki asks, softly. He is astonished at the wonder in his own voice, the childlike wonder he feels himself draw up from the well deep within, and when the Doctor smiles, Loki cannot help but smile back. "A blue box?"

"About ye high," the Doctor confirms, holding his arm above his head to indicate a height. "Deep blue, TARDIS blue. Time And Relative Dimension In Space."

"How does that work?" Loki asks.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you're Gallifreyan: you're not from work. Why does the acronym work in English – what's the Gallifreyan word for TARDIS? Is it a backronym, or—"

"Nobody's ever asked that before," the Doctor interrupts sharply, seeming mildly offended, and he shifts the position of his hands in his pockets, widening his stance. There's something mildly attractive about the way his brow furrows and his lips downturn, his nose wrinkling, even. Time Lords – do they have wives? Lovers? Partners? Presumably they _do_ have sex… "Here we are."

Loki looks down the alleyway the Doctor gestures to, and he feels his lips part. He laughs his delight, taking a few steps forwards – it is, indeed, a blue box, crafted of what seems like wood. It looks like a telephone box specifically for calling the police – Loki imagines such things were common perhaps in the sixties in the UK.

The Doctor moves past him, offering him a slight smile, and then he takes a flat key out of his pocket, putting it into the lock of the TARDIS' door and turning it. Loki hears the soft click of the lock, and the doors creak softly as they open: golden light streams out from within, and Loki gasps as the energy hits him in the chest.

It's the same energy that clings to the Doctor's hair and skin and clothes, radiating from him: it is more than the scents and tastes that come away from him, but the very _power_ that surrounds him, seems to bleed out from within him. The TARDIS has that power, magnified a thousandfold. Loki feels it wash over him, tingling on his flesh and combing through his hair, but he realizes that it is _more_ than that.

This power, this foreign energy, has a _pulse_ to it. He feels it interact with his magic as it settles against him, feels it mimic his own seiðr rhythms, feels it fill in the gaps. It's… Loki feels his tongue heavy, feels his mouth abruptly dry, and he drops his case on the floor and scrambles back, away from the mystical _blue box_ he's thought about for so long.

"What?" the Doctor asks, his eyes wide with concern, and Loki stumbles until he finds the wall behind him, leaning back against the brick of the alleyway. He steps toward Loki, but before he can come close enough to touch him, Loki raises his left hand, bringing electricity to the surface of his flesh and holding it like a weapon.

The Doctor's hands go up like someone threatened with a gun, and Loki looks toward the TARDIS, his lips curled, his skin _tingling._ "What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?" he hisses, and he feels himself squirm, unwillingly, beneath the tingling energy as it affects his hairs to stand on end. "Is that why you've brought me here? To _feed_ me to this blue monster of yours?"

"Monster—" The Doctor shakes his head emphatically, his hands still raised above his head. "No, no, it's a ship. A living ship."

"I've flown on living ships," Loki says. "That has too much— too much _soul_ to be a ship." He feels the intelligence behind the cloud of energy around him, feels the care in the movements, and he feels an intense _revulsion_ inside him. The energy itself seems at odds with Loki's own, and when he inhales he tastes it in the back of his throat.

The Doctor takes a slow step closer, reaching out. The crackle from Loki's hand, which is causing steam to billow up as the rain hits him, seems not to deter him: he simply reaches for Loki's other hand, which is flat against the wall. The Doctor's hand is warm on Loki's own, and Loki can feel his heart – his Midgardian heart, so _vulnerable_ , so lacking in defences as his proper body would be – beat fast and hard in his chest.

"It's alright," he says softly, his voice quietly soothing, full of warmth. His eyes are tender now, and he is supremely gentle as he pulls Loki closer. Loki's steps are stumbling, and he feels himself _shake_. "Trust me, just trust me, alright? You could have killed me: it's the last you can do."

 _Trust_ him? Trust this madman? Is Loki truly so insane? Is he so _bored_ by his life on this planet that he would let a stranger feed him to a monster of such proportions as this one? Hating himself, momentarily, Loki realizes his answer is plain: _yes_. He slowly reabsorbs the crackling energy, letting the Doctor pull him closer, and he stares, disbelieving, as the Doctor takes his hand and very gently lays it on the blue-painted wood of the TARDIS' outer shell.

It feels like wood. Cold, grainy, flat.

Loki looks through the open door and within. On its inside, the TARDIS is a high-ceilinged dome, with grating on the ground and pillars made of some unknown material supporting it. In the very centre of the room, there is some sort of console, dominated by a blue-glowing pillar.

"It's alive," Loki whispers. "It's… It's more than _sentient_. Surely you can feel it?" He is reminded of the stories of behemoths he once heard as a child: stories of great monsters, serpents, dragons, so large their size could barely be comprehended.

"Yes, I can," the Doctor whispers back. His hand is on top of Loki's, the flesh warm and surprisingly soft, and Loki swallows. He frowns, glancing between the TARDIS and Loki, and says quietly, "She's trying to open a telepathic connection. She says she can't get in."

"Why does she need a telepathic connection with me?" Loki asks. The askance must be so subtle at the edges of his well-protected mind that he barely feels it, and he reaches out, lets himself be _aware_ … There's a cloud of consciousness around him, seemingly surrounding him on every side, and it feels _warm_. Tender, even. "This is the toll, then? For unlimited travel, for the universe… I must let this thing inside my head."

"I never thought of it as a price to pay," the Doctor says, shaking his head slightly, and he says, "Barely anyone ever notices it – she just links to people's subconscious, the backs of their minds. Of course, I've not had all that many telepaths aboard."

"I'm not a telepath," Loki murmurs. He can't do this. He _oughtn't_. "If she sees my mind… Can you?"

"No, it doesn't work like that," the Doctor says. "She doesn't really say anything in _words_ , just in feelings, pushes. I'm sorry, I didn't realize this would be—" Loki tips his head back, his eyelids drooping shut, and all at once, he drops his carefully-built telepathic shields. It all floods in at once. The welcoming warmth, like a crackling fire in a hearth, seeps through his head, rushing into the space between his ears and filling it with golden light, and he hears a sort of _rush_ where once there was sound.

Loki feels light-headed as he rebuilds himself, allowing the TARDIS to retain the new connection. He feels her _prod_ him.

"Ah," Loki says. "Don't do that." She does it again: it's the equivalent of someone blowing air into one's face, but instead presses against his very seiðr, his energy. Incensed, he prods back. He feels a tingle against his lips, like laughter. "Your TARDIS is laughing at me."

"That's new," the Doctor says, slowly. "You believe she doesn't want you eat you, then?"

"I suppose," Loki mutters. Summoning his suitcase to his hand and ignoring the surprise on the Doctor's face, he steps into the TARDIS, listening to the metallic clank of the grating as his soles slap against it. The TARDIS is all around him, and he feels how large the dimensional pocket is. His seiðr comes away from him in a web, and he feels dozens of rooms and corridors coming away from a doorway from this central room. "You have a library?"

"And a swimming pool," the Doctor says. He is leaning against the central console, his coat thrown over a bannister, his arms crossed neatly over his chest. "What's that? There's an energy field around you."

"It's magic," Loki says softly, distractedly, as he looks around the room. "This is how you travel, then? Her power?"

"It's time energy: she uses the power of the Vortex itself."

"The Vortex?" Loki repeats softly: when his power touches the central console, he feels a light _slap_ of power retort, and he draws the tendrils of seiðr back into himself. "The Time Vortex?"

"Something wrong?"

"It tastes bad, let us say," Loki says simply. "The time energy. I am a being of chaos, Doctor: such things take getting used to." Loki reaches out with his hand, this time, stroking some of the elements of the console, touching lightly over buttons, dials and rotors. Leaning over the console desk, he puts his hand against the pillar in the middle. Even through the glass, he can feel the mechanism within vibrating with energy, and he takes in a slow breath. "This is energy of the highest order. We're incompatible."

"Time isn't _order_ ," the Doctor argues. "It's more like—"

"Things that have happened have happened, even if you can go back and change them. Things that will happen will happen, regardless of what is to come." The Doctor scowls.

"That's just _wrong_ ," he says. His eyebrows knit together, and Loki bites his lip.

"I am a being of wrongness," Loki declares, with some self-satisfaction. "So. Where are we going? Do you decide, or does she?"

"Me," the Doctor says. There is tingling on Loki's lips, and he chuckles. The TARDIS disagrees, then…

"Then please," Loki says, waving his hand toward the console. "Let us go forth." The Doctor is smiling as he looks at Loki, and Loki looks at him, wonderingly. He begins turning dials upon the console, flicking switches, turning rotors and pressing buttons: Loki watches him as he plays the console like an instrument, and finally his hand rests upon a large handle, from an old-fashioned switch. "You'll bring me back here," he says quietly. "To this time? It will be like none has passed?"

"I promise," the Doctor says, and he flicks the switch. The console's central pillar moves, flaring with energy, and Loki watches the mechanism as it moves rhythmically up and down. "That's the Time Rotor," the Doctor says, and with that unprompted answer as invitation, Loki asks a hundred questions before their journey is through.


End file.
